Bernardo Hay also Bernard Hay was a British painter. The artist lived and worked mostly in Italy.
Bernardo Hay was born in 1864 to the British painter Jane Benham Hay, who was living in Florence at the time. His mother was one of the leading figures in the pre-Raphaelite movement in England. She had been separated from her husband, the painter William Hay, for a long time when the child was born, so that the latter is out of the question as a father. The mother later married the Italian painter Francesco Saverio Altamura , who belonged to the Macchiaioli artist group and with whom she had been romantically linked since the late 1850s.
Bernardo Hay studied painting with Altamura in Naples. In the early 1880s he lived briefly in Venice, Florence, and Bruges. In 1883 he participated in the annual art exhibitions in Milan (with four paintings: field of flowers , summer in Posillipo and two views of Venice) and Rome ( view of the Grand Canal , the city of Bruges and a view of the Belgian countryside). Around 1885 he exhibited in Turin ( Portrait of Carmanella , spring flower and Marine landscape of Resina). He returned to Naples in the late 1880s and thereafter mainly made views of scenes and people around the Gulf of Naples. In 1889 he still lived in Naples and later settled on Capri.
Apart from the few known views of Bruges and Belgium, landscape views of the Gulf of Naples as well as portrait studies of the simple Neapolitan population were among the artist's preferred subjects. There were also some views of Venice. Only oil paintings by Hay are known. Information on the artist's death varies sometimes with 1931 in Capri and sometimes with 1934 in Naples. He was known by the nickname Pito ( German the little one ).