Frederick Daniel Hardy (13 February 1827 – 1 April 1911)[1][2] was an English genre painter and member of the Cranbrook Colony of artists.

Frederick's father was also an amateur artist, taught by James Duffield Harding and Edmund Bristow.

He studied for about three years, but finally abandoned music to become an artist like his elder brother George Hardy (1822–1909).

Christopher Wood, writer on Victorian Art, commented on one of Hardy's earliest paintings, Cottage Fireside (1850): “Some of his early works of this kind are beautifully observed, and quite unsentimental, omitting the usual children, pets and other familiar props of the cottage idyll painters.

And in 1859 he painted his first picture, The Foreign Guest, that has a narrative involving a larger group of people, and is similar to much of his best work in the 1860s.

Hardy's work is to be found in numerous public collections, notably at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery which holds nineteen of his paintings.

Their eldest son Frederick (1853-1937), attended the Royal Academy Schools and became an artist, using the name “Dorofield Hardy”.

Frederick Daniel Hardy died at Cranbrook in April 1911 and was buried beside his wife in St Dunstan's churchyard.