George Hardy's ancestors were from Horsforth in Yorkshire; Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy, First Earl of Cranbrook, was his second cousin.

[4] Hardy's paintings of cottage interiors reflect the influence of Thomas Webster and Dutch genre painters of the seventeenth century, as can be seen for example in The Leisure Hour (1855).

[5] During the 1850s George Hardy helped his younger brother Frederick Daniel, in particular to improve his painting of human figures.

The idea for the painting might be related to a comment in The Art Journal about George Hardy's Royal Academy exhibit, Interior of an English Cottage (1849): “Every brick in the floor is marked; it is a successful story in all but the white round the fireplace.”[8] George and Ellen Hardy had four children.

George Hardy's youngest daughter Marguerite Ellen was an artist who painted mountain scenes in the Khyber Pass following her marriage to Professor Llewellyn Tipping, one of the founders of Islamia College, Peshawar and its first principal.