Jeremiah Pearson Hardy

Jeremiah Pearson Hardy (c. 1800–1888) was a painter who spent most of his career in Bangor, Maine and specialized in portraits.

He was also the central figure in a circle of 19th-century Bangor painters that included his daughter, Anna Eliza Hardy (1839–1934), sister Mary Ann Hardy, and pupils Isabel Graham Eaton, Walter Franklin Lansil and George Edward Dale.

By 1826 Hardy had moved to Bangor, then a booming lumber port, and stayed for the rest of his life, painting portraits of not only the local elite but Penobscot people (a Native American group), the African-American barber Abraham Hanson, and members of his own family.

By the 1830s, he was painting wealthy Bangor citizens but needed to travel to other parts of the State to find work.

By the 1850s, it is clear that the new medium of photography influenced his paintings, and in the 1859-60 Bangor City Directory, Hardy is listed as a portrait painter and photographer with his son Francis.