HICKS: THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM

Pierrepont Lacey and Gun

HICKS: THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM

by Joan K Yanni

LOOK AGAIN, Docents, at the wondrous painting The Peaceable Kingdom, on loan until December from Cooperstown.  Though we miss Pierrepont Lacey and Gun, curator Patti Junker could not have made a better trade—even for a short time—than Edward Hicks's work

Perhaps the best known of American folk painters, Edward Hicks (1780-1849) was a Quaker born in the farming country of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia.  A sign and carriage painter by trade, he learned the technique of careful lettering, painting with flat, decorative colors, and the use of gold leaf.

Hicks devoted much of his art to expressing his faith in the peaceful coexistence of man and nature. His popularity today rests largely on his many representations of The Peaceable Kingdom, illustrating the prophecy in the book of Isaiah, Chapter 11.  More than 100 of these exist, for he painted them to give to his friends as expressions of his Quaker faith in God and hope for peace on earth.  He devised stock patterns of all the animals mentioned by Isaiah, but arranged them differently in each picture.

Some of his pictures have scriptural texts carefully lettered across the bottom or around all four sides, as in our loan.  Peaceful beasts with a child in their midst are seen in combination with a river landscape and the scene of William Penn making a treaty with the Indians.  The text reads:

"The leopard with the harmless kid laid down,

            And not one savage beast was seen to

            frown.

            The lion with the fatling on did move,

            A little child was leading them in love.

            The wolf did with the lambkin dwell in

            peace,

            His grim carniv'rous nature there did

            cease.

When the great PENN his famous treaty made

            With Indian chiefs beneath the elm-trees

            shade."