Thomas Fearnley (December 27, 1802, Frederick Bear - 1842, Munich) was a Norwegian painter and pupil of the father of Norwegian National Romanticism JC Dahl. Fearnley himself contributed significantly to the national romanticism movement of Norwegian painting.

Fearnley studied with his friend Jacob Mathias Calmeyer in Christiania, Copenhagen and Stockholm before he met with Dahl in 1826 on a study tour in Western Norway. He traveled in 1828 to Dresden, Germany, and was during 1829-30 Dahl's student in Germany.

He traveled to study in Norway in 1824, 1826, in Italy in 1832, in Paris in 1835, in London in 1836 and returned through Germany and Switzerland back to Norway in 1938.

He died in Munich of typhoid fever .

He was the son of merchant Thomas Fearnley (1768 - 1834) and wife Mary Sophie Paus (1782 - 1838). Fearnley's grandfather emigrated to Halden in the 1700s from Hull in northern England. Fearnley was the father of shipowner, court hunter champion and patron Thomas Nicolai Fearnley and brother of professor of astronomy Carl Fredrik Fearnley.