Edward Hicks
1780-1849
Edward Hicks was an American folk painter and Quaker ministers ('Religious Society of Friends' sect), devoted to the Bible. He was specially attached to the subjects with children and animals.
Hicks was born in Langhorne, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His best-known paintings are probably the 62 extant versions of The Peaceable Kingdom. One of reasons for that is the fact that Quaker minister, and Quakers disapproved of no utilitarian art such as easel painting. Quaker ministers were also not permitted salaries. He needed the income from his painting to support his large family.
The Peaceable Kingdom, as a religious subject and a kind of visual sermon, helped Hicks to justify his vocation. The theme of Peaceable Kingdom depict the verses from Book of Isaiah, chapter 11, Verses 6-9, in the Bible, "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them." Many of these paintings also depict, in the background, the legendary treaty between William Penn and the Lenape at the foundation of Pennsylvania. Hicks's other subjects were historical events, farm life, and Bible stories.
Hicks's mother died when he was an infant, and the people who raised him were Quakers. Hicks embraced the religion himself and became a traveling minister. Hicks began his career as an apprentice to a coach builder, where he learned to paint ornaments on the carriages. Later he started his own business, decorating furniture and other objects.
Hicks's Quaker faith sometimes conflicted with his career as an artist. In fact, he was criticized for engaging in "worldly activity." For a time, he gave up painting. Eventually, he found a way of combining his faith and his work.
An opponent of slavery, he still refused to support political abolitionism or other Quakers who did so. Hicks was a member of the Newtown Monthly Meeting (Monthly Meetings are the local Quaker congregations) and is buried in the graveyard there. His home in Newtown, Pennsylvania, is adjacent to the Meeting's property and is a national historic landmark. His candid memoir, "Memoirs of the Life and Religious Labors of Edward Hicks," was published in 1851 after his death, but it dealt minimally with his art.
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