Sanford Schwartz explores the trailblazing career of 19th-century Quaker folk artist Edward Hicks
Edward Hicks (1780-1849) was the creator of one of the most familiar scenes in American art: the Peaceable Kingdom, which depicts a realm where wild and flesh-eating animals come together with defenseless creatures, and will not harm them. Because Hicks was a Quaker minister, his many renderings of the scene have been taken as largely a self-taught artist's professions of Quaker pacifism.
But here, author and curator Sanford Schwartz, in a wide-ranging study that for the first time looks at Hicks as an imaginative artist as well as a minister, shows how the Peaceable Kingdom paintings-there are some 60 examples, made over 30 years-tell a richer story. In Schwartz's hands, Hicks emerges as a person and a painter who hardly seems to be of the past. We spend time with this passionate, vehement figure who was also empathic and ardently connected to his wide community. And we see how the Kingdom series, though labeled folk art, share much with the work of mainstream artists of the time and even with work we now call outsider art.
"Edward Hicks (1780-1849) has long been considered our foremost folk artist. Many people recognize his name and can visualize his Peaceable Kingdom paintings, with their vision, taken from the Old Testament, of wild, predatory animals coming to an accord with tame, defenseless creatures. But Hicks himself, and especially how he and his work figure in the larger sphere of American culture, remain far from settled topics. It can be questioned whether the painter, who was a widely known Quaker minister and supported his family as a decorator of carriages and other objects, was a folk artist at all. Unlike other such figures, he never stopped developing his art. His Peaceable Kingdoms, worked on continuously for over three decades (and some sixty in number), form in effect a singular ever-changing visual diary. Taking Hicks's measure from different perspectives, Sanford Schwartz looks for the first time at ways in which Hicks is part of all nineteenth-century American art and can also be seen as an outsider artist. Schwartz understands the importance of Quakerism in Hicks's life. Yet he puts a new emphasis on the painter's passionate, contradictory character and on the expressiveness of his animal creations. Volatile, antic, or poignant in demeanor, they are shown to have emotional depths that are rarely felt in American nineteenth-century painting of any stripe"--
