Thomas Harrison Hair

Thomas Harrison Hair (23 December 1808 – 11 August 1875) was a British artist most famous for depictions of industrial scenes in north-eastern England in the first half of the nineteenth century.

T.H. Hair (as he signed his work) was born in Newcastle upon Tyne or the nearby village of Newburn on 23 December 1808, the son of John Hair, a lamp-black maker and tanner from Scotswood, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Hannah Harrison. He was baptised at All Saints' Church, Newcastle upon Tyne on 22 January 1809. Little is known of his early life but he probably trained in the workshops of Mark Lambert (1781–1855), a Tyneside engraver and lithographer. Lambert had been assistant to Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), the famous wood engraver from Cherryburn, Northumberland.

Hair relocated to London in the late 1830s, and produced a body of work there, much of it referring to North East England. Three of his paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts between 1841 and 1849, including one of Tynedale Fell, Cumberland, and another of Bothwell Castle, near Glasgow, suggesting he travelled more widely across northern Britain than just the coal-mining communities of Durham and Northumberland with which he was later primarily associated.

In 1851 he was living and working at Taunton, Somerset. But he had returned to live and work in north-east England by the time of the 1861 census, which records him as an unmarried "Landscape Painter &c", boarding at a Gloucester Street house in Newcastle's Elswick district. He died on 11 August 1875 (not 1882 as stated by many biographies). He was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of All Saints, Newcastle, where he had been baptised.

Most of Hair's work consists of general landscapes, especially scenes in the North East of England. His most notable work however is a set of etchings published in Views of the Collieries ... of Northumberland and Durham (1844) giving rare insights into the visual impact of early nineteenth-century coal-mining and other industrial activities.

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