Frederick Daniel Hardy (13 February 1827 – 1 April 1911) was an English genre painter and member of the Cranbrook Colony of artists. Early life Frederick Daniel Hardy was born at Windsor in Berkshire, the third of eight children of George Hardy (1795–1877) and his wife Sarah (1803–1872). George Hardy was a horn player in the Private Band of Music of the Royal Households of George IV, Queen Adelaide and Queen Victoria. Frederick's father was also an amateur artist, taught by James Duffield Harding and Edmund Bristow. F.D. Hardy's ancestors were from Horsforth in Yorkshire; Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy, First Earl of Cranbrook, was his second cousin. Frederick enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music, Hanover Square, at the age of seventeen. He studied for about three years, but finally abandoned music to become an artist like his elder brother George Hardy (1822–1909). The 1850s: early paintings of cottage interiors Hardy soon became a skilful painter of cottage interiors, but was continually improving his figure painting throughout the 1850s. Christopher Wood, writer on Victorian Art, commented on one of Hardy's earliest paintings, Cottage Fireside (1850): “Some of his early works of this kind are beautifully observed, and quite unsentimental, omitting the usual children, pets and other familiar props of the cottage idyll painters. The old kitchen... is delineated as dispassionately as a Dutch seventeenth century kitchen by Ostade or Brekelenkamp.” In 1851 Hardy had his first two pictures accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy. On 11 March 1852 he married Rebecca Sophia Dorofield (1827–1906). They lived at Snell's Wood, near Amersham in Buckinghamshire, three miles from the farm of Rebecca's parents. Their first child was born there in March 1853. By July 1853 they had moved to 2 Waterloo Place at Cranbrook, Kent, a house that Hardy kept all his life. Hardy's painting in the 1850s was influenced by the works of 17th Dutch artists, such as Pieter de Hooch and Nicolaes Maes, and by the paintings of his friend Thomas Webster. Throughout the decade Hardy gradually included a few figures into his pictures of interiors. And in 1859 he painted his first picture, The Foreign Guest, that has a narrative involving a larger group of people, and is similar to much of his best work in the 1860s. The 1860s and beyond During the 1860s Hardy painted the pictures for which he is best known, particularly paintings of children's activities