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Edward Hicks
(American, 1780–1849)
The Peaceable Kingdom, c. 1822–26
Oil on canvas, 21 11 /16 x 27 inches
Provenance: Hung in the artist’s home, Newtown, Pennsylvania; gift to his only
son Isaac Worstall Hicks; his daughter Sarah Worstall Hicks; her grandniece
Eleanore Hicks Lee Swartz; collection of a Hicks descendant
Exhibited: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Williamsburg, Virginia,
The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks (Feb. 7–Sept. 6, 1999); traveled to the Philadelphia
Museum of Art (Oct. 10, 1999–Jan. 2, 2000), the Denver Art Museum (Feb. 12–Apr.
30, 2000), the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum of the Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco (Sept. 24, 2000–Jan. 7, 2001)
Recorded: Eleanore Price Mather and Dorothy Canning Miller, Edward Hicks:
His Peaceable Kingdoms and Other Paintings (East Brunswick, N.J.: Associated
University Presses, 1983), p. 116; Carolyn J. Weekley, The Kingdoms of Edward
Hicks (Williamsburg, Va.: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, in association
with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999), p. 191, no. 7 (repro. in color, p. 108, pl. 98)
Reference: Scott W. Nolley and Carolyn J. Weekley, “The Nature of Edward
Hicks’s Painting,” The Magazine Antiques, vol. 155, no. 2 (Feb. 1999), pp. 280–89
(repro. in color, p. 286, pl. 9 and 9a)
Edward Hicks, the Quaker minister and painter, was the son of Isaac and Catherine Hicks and the grandson of Gilbert Hicks
of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. 1 The Hicks family was wealthy, owned considerable land, and operated several businesses in
the area. Both Gilbert and Isaac held local posts associated with the colonial British government. In 1776, Gilbert was
regarded as a traitor to American concerns and he fled Pennsylvania. Hicks’s family lands were then confiscated and the
artist’s parents lived in reduced circumstances thereafter.
Hicks’s mother died when he was almost two years old. Unable to care for all of his five young children, his father boarded
most of them with Bucks County families. In 1785, Hicks went to live with the Quakers David and Elizabeth Twining on
their farm near Newtown. Ten years later, the youngest Hicks child was apprenticed to the coach makers William and Henry
Tomlinson in nearby Langhorne. It was during his five-year apprenticeship that Edward learned a variety of techniques
associated with ornamental painting, an important branch of the coach and carriage making business.
Edward was not a birthright Quaker, nor was he a Friend when he served his apprenticeship and learned his trade. His immediate
family was Anglican. After the death of his mother, his father sometimes attended the Newtown Presbyterian Church. Neither
of these religious affiliations would have discouraged Hicks’s pursuit of painting as a career, including his eventual easel pictures
of local farms, historical subjects, and pastoral scenes. Some conservative Quakers, including those living in rural Bucks County,
considered such artwork to be frivolous, of no use, and contrary to Quaker codes of plainness and simplicity.
By 1803, however, Hicks had become deeply interested in the Society of Friends, had married Sarah Worstall, a member of
Middletown Monthly Meeting, and had been received into membership at the same meeting. His increasing work for the
Friends became the most important aspect of his life. In 1811, Middletown Monthly Meeting recorded Hicks as a Quaker
minister. Ultimately it was the profound influence of his religious life and his response to criticism that led him to create
the Peaceable Kingdom pictures for which he is so widely known today. Decorative painting of the type he performed in his