James Hardy junior came from an artistic family. His father was the landscape painter James Hardy senior and his brother was Heywood Hardy. His cousin, Daniel Frederick Hardy, was a leading member of the Cranbrook colony of artists.
A painter of rustic landscapes and hunting scenes, Hardy specialised in sporting scenes depicting dogs and game, usually set in highland scenery. He painted both in oil and watercolour and exhibited regularly, at the Royal Academy between 1862 and 1886, the British Institution, the Suffolk Street Gallery and the New Watercolour Society of which he became a member in 1877.
The artist lived all his life in Bristol and died there on 4th April, 1889.
