Thomas Harrison Hair

Three of his paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts between 1841 and 1849, including one of Tynedale Fell, Cumberland, and another of Bothwell Castle, near Glasgow, suggesting he travelled more widely across northern Britain than just the coal-mining communities of Durham and Northumberland with which he was later primarily associated.

His most notable work however is a set of etchings published in Views of the Collieries ... of Northumberland and Durham (1844) giving rare insights into the visual impact of early nineteenth-century coal-mining and other industrial activities.

By the late 1830s his primary inspiration was "the unusual shapes of pit-head buildings with decorative detail of coal-trucks, locomotives and swirling smoke and steam",[2] but his views also typically record the wider coalfield setting including the pumping engines, ponies, cranes, sailing colliers and the "drops" (staithes) used to load them.

Many also take in the rural or waterside settings, Hair rendering the waste and weed-strewn spoil heaps as faithfully as the more picturesque rolling hills, ponds and water wheels favoured by his more conventional contemporaries.

Atkinson speculates that "this was an unconscious attempt to emphasise the verticality of so many tall buildings, chimneys and the like, and with this one reservation one feels confident in looking upon these illustrations as closely observed and reasonably accurate portrayals of the contemporary scene".

Within a few years of their initial publication, and within Hair's own lifetime, many of his plates were pirated when W. Fordyce used them to illustrate his Coal and Iron (1860) after stripping out their artist and engraver credits, some being crudely "updated" by the addition of features which had not existed at the time of the original drawings.