On Edward Hicks

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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"--