Edward Hicks

Largely thanks to his many, appealing treatments of the biblical theme of the peaceable kingdom, Edward Hicks is the best known of the self-trained or “folk” artists who worked in the American hinterland in the first half of the nineteenth century. Hicks was born in Attleborough, now Langhorne, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His father, an affluent British official, was forced to flee the country at the time of the American Revolution and his mother died when he was only two, leaving the young Edward virtually an orphan. Raised in the Quaker household of family friends, he was apprenticed at the age of thirteen to a carriage-maker. Hicks’s artistic abilities were soon evident, and he became a partner in a coach-making and ornamental painting business before establishing his own shop, in Newtown, Pennsylvania, in 1810.

Hicks’s output encompassed shop signs, painted furniture, fireboards, and alphabet blocks, which he is often credited with inventing. His work must have been in demand, for at times his shop included a number of assistants. However, after he was formally initiated as a Quaker minister, in 1811, Hicks was troubled by Quaker strictures on visual art as too worldly. He was a gifted preacher and traveled widely to deliver his sermons. In 1814, he abandoned painting for farming, but the resulting financial hardship for his large family soon led him back to painting. Thereafter, Hicks satisfied his scruples by painting works on religious and moral themes, notably that of the peaceable kingdom. He also painted scenes from American history, including William Penn’s treaty with the Indians, and commissioned “portraits” of local farmsteads that meticulously itemize the owners’ livestock and family members.

Painting for a local clientele, Hicks worked outside the increasingly sophisticated, urban art world of early nineteenth-century America. In his lifetime, he was recognized more for his gifts as a preacher than as a painter, and his works were forgotten after his death. They were rediscovered in the 1930s, when so-called folk art began to enjoy new popularity among American collectors. Scholars agree, however, that the “naive” simplicity that has made Hicks’s paintings universally popular was the result not of limited training or ability but of artistic choice on the part of an artist struggling to reconcile his Quaker beliefs with a passion for visual expression.