Edward Hicks (1780-1849)

By Toby Berryman

Edward Hicks, The Falls of Niagara, ca. 1825. Oil on canvas, 80 x 97cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

It rather goes without saying that revered Quaker preacher and part-time tavern sign painter wasn’t exactly an established career path in the late eighteenth-century United States. And yet, it was from these very pursuits that Edward Hicks (born this week, almost two hundred and fifty years ago) found the artistry that would later earn him the title of America’s most celebrated folk artist. Variably (and somewhat disparagingly) termed primitive or naïve, Hicks’ admittedly repetitive, predominantly rural scenes and inhabited landscapes served as a perfect distillation of the ardent Quaker ideology that would define his later life. 

Born to Anglican parents in Pennsylvania, Hicks’ childhood was turbulent owing not only to the ongoing Revolutionary War, but also as a result of family disaster. While his loyalist father was left penniless by British defeat, his mother died when Hicks was not yet two years old, leaving him in the care of close Quaker family friends at Twining Farm. Despite a notably successful coach-painting apprenticeship at age thirteen and burgeoning career independently, Hicks began to see in himself a ‘wayward’ figure predisposed with frivolity and ungodly pleasures. By his twenty-fifth birthday, he had returned to the Quaker beliefs with which he had once grown up. 

Edward Hicks, A Peaceable Kingdom with Quakers Bearing Banners, 1829-1830. Oil on canvas, 45 x 60cm. Terra Foundation.

After his marriage to a fellow Quaker, it was not long before his congregation recorded him as a minister and Hicks began to travel, first throughout the state and later the country, as a leading Quaker preacher. But this was a costly mission. Hicks continued to maintain a practical painterly career to support his travels, decorating clock faces, tables, chairs, sleds, and (particularly ironically) tavern signage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his embellishment of such household objects was censured by others of his faith, seen as vain and luxurious. In 1815, likely as a result of this fallout, Hicks instead attempted to support his family through traditional farming, an exercise that was ultimately a financial disaster and left him in even greater need of the funds that his painting work had quietly afforded him. 

After all, Hicks was living through an especially tumultuous period for the ministry of the Society of Friends. In fact, a growing schism was led by his own cousin Elias Hicks who advocated for more liberal theological views, and so surrounded by politicking in the Quaker community, he began to supplement his own preaching with more Quakerly art production. Led in particular by Isaiah 11: 6-9’s vision of a peaceable kingdom, Hicks came to this traditional art later in life, but would go on to produce nearly one hundred slight variations on the theme. Sometimes accompanied by his own text compositions, particularly when depicting less overtly religious subjects such as The Falls of Niagara (1825), Hicks’ painterly style was direct and his works were often dominated by warm, harmonious tones. At times populated by Quaker figures explicitly, Hicks’ altogether repetitive artistic approach shared his religious ambitions – to seek out and encourage the redeemed soul(s). 

Although, at the time of his death in 1849, Hicks was first remembered as a distinguished Christian minister, it is now his painted oeuvre which defines his legacy. And so, next time you sit down to study another example of the aesthetic and ideological success of Catholic, Lutheran Reformation, or even Arabic art, spare a thought for the highly influential Quaker master who appears far more forgotten. 

Bibliography

Britannica Editors. “Edward Hicks.” Encyclopedia Britannica, September 21, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Hicks. 

Cotter, Holland. “Art Review: Finding Endless Conflict Hidden in a Peaceable Kingdom.” The New York Times – National Edition, June 16, 2000. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/16/arts/art-review-finding-endless-conflict-hidden-in-a-peaceable-kingdom. 

Enger, Reed. “Edward Hicks, A Pacifist Paints Lions and Leopards.” Obelisk Art History, April 4, 2016. http://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/edward-hicks/.

Ford, Alice. Edward Hicks: Painter of the Peaceable Kingdom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 

Nolley, Scott Webster. “Edward Hicks: Peaceable Kingdom, Lot Essay.” Christie’s, September 2008. https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-edward-hicks-1835-1840-peaceable-kingdom-5118409.

Weekley, Carolyn J. The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks. Williamsburg, VA: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1999.