A Baltimore native, Howard Hardy attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in the 1920s, and after graduation was hired as an illustrator by the Baltimore Sun. In 1930 he moved to New York City, where he pursued a career in teaching and taught for over thirty years at the Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, and Newark School of Fine & Industrial Art, New Jersey. He retired to Long Island in 1975, where he painted or sketched every day until the week before his death in 1988.
