Edward Hicks (1780-1849)

Aliases: Edward (1780) Hicks

Professions: Painter

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  Edward Hicks 1780-1849 , The Peaceable Kingdom with the Leopard of Serenity oil on canvas

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  Edward Hicks (1780-1849), 1849

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  Edward Hicks (1780-1849), Circa 1835-1845

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  EDWARD HICKS (1780-1849)

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Edward Hicks Biography

(b Attleborough [now Langhorne], PA, 4 April 1780; d Newtown, PA, 23 Aug 1849). He was raised by a devout Quaker family following his mother’s death. At thirteen he was apprenticed for seven years to a coachmaker, where he developed the techniques of painting and lettering. By 1801 he had gone into business as a coach-, house- and sign-painter, later expanding his trade to include such items as milk-buckets, clockfaces and elaborate fireboards. Profoundly affected by his Quaker upbringing, he began to disapprove of painting as trifling and insubstantial, and in 1812 he became a Quaker minister. Hicks received no formal artistic training, and it was not until c. 1820 that he began to paint creatively. His paintings are infused with his intense religious conviction, and he reconciled his two vocations by keeping the former ‘within the bounds of innocence and usefulness’ and by creating images of morality. Most of his pictures were variations on Isaiah’s biblical prophecy (Isaiah 11:6–9). Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom pictures were ‘painted sermons’, executed from about 1820 to the time of his death. Allegorical in nature, they depict the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy: benign animals and trusting infants co-exist with equanimity, while, in the background, William Penn can invariably be seen effecting his famous treaty with the Indians. The Peaceable Kingdom paintings are imaginative in composition and serene and sincere in mood, although technically unsophisticated. They were generally produced as gifts or commissioned works for relatives and friends. Occasionally Hicks indulged in homily when he lettered rhymed scriptural texts around the border of a picture.

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