Edward Hicks

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Edward Hicks was a recorded minister of the Religious Society of Friends who supported his ministry partly through painting, a practice sitting uneasily beside Quaker plainness testimony against ornament. Between about 1820 and his death in 1849 he painted roughly sixty two versions of The Peaceable Kingdom, a composition drawn from Isaiah 11:6 to 8 showing the wolf with the lamb, the leopard with the kid, the calf and the young lion together, led by a small child.

He painted the bulk of the series through the years the Society of Friends split into Hicksite and Orthodox factions in 1827, a rupture named for his own cousin Elias Hicks. Art historians read the repeated returns to the same peaceable scene, painted dozens of times rather than once and set aside, as Hicks's own visual answer to a division running through his own family and his own meeting.

That a minister who supported himself partly by painting returned sixty two times to one image of reconciled opposites during the very years his own religious community split in two marks The Peaceable Kingdom as a documented case of a devotional image doing the work its own painter's ministry could not settle through preaching alone.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Edward Hicks was born in 1780 in Attleborough, present-day Langhorne, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and became a recorded minister of the Religious Society of Friends, a formal recognition of his gift for vocal ministry within Quaker worship. He supported that ministry in part through painting, a trade that sat uneasily beside the Society of Friends's own testimony against ornament and worldly display, since decorative painting was the kind of work plainness testimony existed to discourage.

Hicks resolved that tension in his own practice by turning his brush toward devotional subject matter rather than decorative or commercial work alone, most famously The Peaceable Kingdom, a composition drawn from Isaiah 11:6 to 8 that he painted roughly sixty two times between about 1820 and his death in 1849, using his trade to produce religious teaching rather than ornament.

That a recorded minister whose own community held reservations about painting as a trade became known chiefly for a devotional image painted dozens of times over marks Hicks's career as a documented case of a Quaker minister turning a trade his own tradition viewed with suspicion into an instrument of the ministry it supported.