Thomas Bush Hardy (1842–1897) was a highly prolific artist who achieved great popular success. He belonged to the generation of later 19th-century British marine artists whose careers developed in the wake of the success achieved by such watercolourists as Clarkson Stanfield, Edward William Cooke and Copley Fielding.
Hardy was born in Sheffield in 1842. Little is known about his artistic training and it is presumed that he was self-taught. Age nineteen he enlisted on the Unionist side in the American Civil War, but he returned from America just a year later when he invalided out. By 1870 he had settled in London, with a clerical job and a developing career as a painter specialising in coastal and marine views.
In 1884 Hardy was elected a Member of the Royal Society of British Artists. He exhibited with the Society and also at the Royal Academy. His paintings feature coastal scenes in England and the Netherlands, the French Channel ports and the Venetian Lagoon.
