Nasturtions

Anna Eliza Hardy was born in Bangor, Maine on January 26, 1839. She was the daughter of the portraitist Jeremiah Pearson Hardy (1800-1887) and the niece of Mary Ann Hardy (1809-1887), a miniaturist and landscape painter. A double portrait of Anna, or "Annie" as she was called, with her mother, which was painted by her father, is in the M. and M. Karolik Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hardy studied painting with her father and with the painter Abbott Thayer in Dublin, New Hampshire. She continued her studies with the French flower painter Georges Jeannin in Paris. She lived most of her life in Maine, although she had strong ties to the Boston art community, where she participated in exhibitions at the Boston Art Club for more than twenty years (1888-1909). Her work was also exhibited at the National Academy of Design (1876-1877) and at Doll and Richards Gallery in Boston. Several of Hardy's still-life paintings were published as chromolithographs by the Boston firm of Louis Prang and Co. Hardy painted fruit still-lifes in formal, tabletop arrangements that have their genesis in examples by the Peale family of Philadelphia. Her floral subjects, on the other hand, display a greater freedom. Whether depicting a basket of fresh-cut flowers resting on the ground, or as in the present example, a tangled vine cascading down a wall, Hardy's floral still lifes are more in the sprit of the truth-to-nature aesthetic preached by John Ruskin, which informed American landscape and still-life painting beginning in the late 1850s. Paintings by Hardy are in the collections of the Bangor Public Library, Bangor, Maine; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; and the University of Maine Museum of Art in Orono.