Cork-Cutters by Royal Appointment:
Hardy and Page
| John Forbes Hardy (1816–1906), Artist |
John Forbes Hardy, the son of Joseph Hardy and his wife Mary (née Southard), was born at the village of Hampstead, now part of north London, in October 1816 (1). A history of Hampstead, published in 1878, described:
Hampstead is now nearly joined to London by rows of villas and terraces; but within the memory of the present generation it was separated from town by a broad belt of pleasant fields. Eighty or a hundred years ago it was a rural village (2).
Joseph Hardy ran a business as a cork-cutter, a now vanished profession, based at a shop in the London street of Piccadilly. A bill issued in December 1821 advertised that he was the holder of a royal warrant of appointment:
|
Joseph Hardy, Cork Manufacturer,
to His Majesty & Their Royal Highnesses the Dukes of York, Sussex, Cambridge, Gloucester & Prince of Saxe Cobourg, 29 (opposite St. James's Church) Piccadilly. |
For more about the cork-cutters of Piccadilly see the section:
Cork-Cutters by Royal Appointment.
In January 1826, when John Forbes Hardy was nine years old, he inherited a legacy from his maternal grandmother Mary Ann Southard (née Forbes) (3). Possibly this ensured some financial independence, which encouraged him to pursue a career as an artist. This is suggested in a biographical note which stated: ‘Of independent means, he took to painting as his principal hobby at an early age’ (4).
In the 1841 census Joseph and Mary Hardy, with their son John Forbes Hardy, were residing at Harrow Lodge, Hampstead. Albion Cottage was listed on the next census page. The artist John Constable (1776–1837) rented Albion Cottage when he first moved to Hampstead in 1819. Harrow Lodge and Albion Cottage were located at a summit on Hampstead Heath, a high point with sweeping views of the surrounding area. Constable’s painting titled Hampstead Heath, with the house called ‘The Salt Box’, in the collections of London’s Tate, shows a scene painted from close to Albion Cottage (5).
The parish register of St John-at-Hampstead has a record of the Hardys’ association with Hampstead from the early 1800s. Possibly, in Hampstead, the Hardys encountered John Constable absorbed in his work on his landscape paintings.
On 12 June 1847, at St Luke’s Church, Chelsea, John Forbes Hardy married Rosalina Parsloe, the daughter of James Parsloe, a ‘green grocer’. In the marriage register, John gave his profession as ‘landscape painter’.
A view believed to be of Hampstead Heath by John Forbes Hardy
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Auction information at
artnet  ; and
Invaluable .
This same painting appears to have been sold at an earlier auction in 2008 . The 2008 auction description stated:
John Forbes Hardy, A View of Hampstead Heath, signed and dated 1853. |
In the 1851 census, the address of Hardy, ‘landscape artist’, and his wife Rosalina was Heath Street, Hampstead, near to his parents who were still living at Harrow Lodge.
In 1852 Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893), who painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style, selected Heath Street as the setting for his masterpiece titled Work now in the Manchester Art Gallery; another version is in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (6). On his strolls along Heath Street, Ford Madox Brown may have met John Forbes Hardy, but this can only be speculated.
Work (1852–1865), a painting by Ford Madox Brown
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The setting is The Mount on Heath Street, Hampstead
(see Work by Ford Madox Brown , from Wikipedia,
for discussion and images). Note: In the 1851 census, Heath Street was the address of John Forbes Hardy. |
In 1857 John Forbes Hardy, with his wife Rosalina, left Hampstead and settled in the seaside town of Worthing on the south coast of Sussex. His parents also relocated to Worthing for their retirement. The Hardy family were familiar with the town as they first visited the Worthing area when John was a boy of about ten or eleven years old (7).
At Worthing, in the 1861 census, Joseph and Mary Hardy were living at 24 Warwick Street, and the home of John and Rosalina (Rose) Hardy was 2 Marlborough Terrace. This was the last census for both Joseph and Mary. Joseph Hardy, aged 74, was buried on 16 May 1863 at St Mary’s Church, Broadwater in Worthing; the death of Mary Clarke Hardy, aged 78, was registered in the Worthing district in 1868 (8).
For John Forbes Hardy, the surroundings of his home locales of Hampstead and Sussex provided inspiration for his paintings and, on his travels, he painted scenes of ‘Wales, the moors and dales of Yorkshire, and the Pyrenees’ (9). Examples of his work, found at online auction databases, include ‘Town Scene on the Rhine’, ‘On an Italian Lake’, ‘In the South of Italy’, ‘Edinburgh Castle’, and ‘Windsor Castle’ (10).
The edition of The Examiner on 16 June 1877 published a notice of a current display at the ‘Autotype Fine Art Gallery’, located at 36 Rathbone Place in the Fitzrovia district of London (11). The specialty of this art gallery was an innovative method of photographic reproduction (12). Included in the sale were ‘twenty-nine studies of John Forbes Hardy, at 7s. 6d. each.’ The artwork of Hardy may have had some popular appeal at the time. Also in the sale was ‘Romeo and Juliet, by Ford Madox Brown, 21s.’
John Forbes Hardy, aged 90, died in December 1906; he was buried in Heene Cemetery, Worthing, West Sussex (13).
General References
Databases, with browsable document images, hosted by Ancestry online:
- Census records, The National Archives.
- London parish registers, London Metropolitan Archives.
Biographical Notes for John Forbes Hardy:
- John
Forbes Hardy ,
Friends of Heene Cemetery, Worthing, West Sussex.
- Obituary notice for John Forbes Hardy published on 12 December 1906 in the Worthing Gazette, Worthing, Sussex (The British Newspaper Archive accessed at FindMyPast).
Notes
(1) Hardy family history was recorded in a document listed for sale online at Abebooks (viewed April 2021); described as a ‘hand painted illuminated frontispiece leaf with genealogy from family bible’.
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| The inscription reads:
Joseph Hardy, born 16 May 1788, and Mary Clarke Southard, born 29 May 1790 married 17 March 1811 at Hampstead. Their only son John Forbes Hardy, born at Hampstead, 24 October 1816, married 12 June 1847, Rose Parsloe. |
John Forbes Hardy, was baptised on 27 November 1816 at the church of St John-at-Hampstead (his middle name, Forbes, was the maiden name of his maternal grandmother).
(2)
‘Hampstead’ in Edward Walford, Old and New London:
Volume 5, London, 1878, pp. 438–449 (accessed at
British
History Online ).
(3) The will of Mary Ann Southard, widow of Kensington, London, was probated on 2 January 1826 (PCC Will, National Archives). In the will she stated: ‘I give and bequeath unto each of my grandchildren living at my decease . . . . the sum of one thousand pounds’ on attaining the age of twenty one years.
(4) Obituary notice for John Forbes Hardy, Worthing Gazette, 12 December 1906.
(5)
John
Constable , Tate online, comments on the
artist and his time in Hampstead at Albion Cottage.
Another description of John Constable in Hampstead is at
HampsteadHeath.net .
A note on Bellmoor
House , near Harrow Lodge and Albion Cottage,
states the location is the ’highest point in Inner London’.
(6)
‘Work’, painting by Ford Madox Brown , from Wikipedia.
(7) Obituary notice for John Forbes Hardy, Worthing Gazette, 12 December 1906.
(8) FreeREG online database and General Register Office (GRO) online death indexes.
(9) Obituary notice for John Forbes Hardy, Worthing Gazette, 12 December 1906.
(10)
Invaluable online auction database.
(11) The British Newspaper Archive accessed at FindMyPast.
(12) A brief company history of the
Autotype
Company , British Museum website.
(13)
A photograph of the memorial gravestone of John Forbes Hardy is at the
Find-A-Grave website.
Text Copyright © WhistlerHistory 2023.