This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Edward Hicks was born in 1780 in Attleborough, present-day Langhorne, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and became a recorded minister of the Religious Society of Friends, a formal recognition of his gift for vocal ministry within Quaker worship. He supported that ministry in part through painting, a trade that sat uneasily beside the Society of Friends's own testimony against ornament and worldly display, since decorative painting was the kind of work plainness testimony existed to discourage.
Hicks resolved that tension in his own practice by turning his brush toward devotional subject matter rather than decorative or commercial work alone, most famously The Peaceable Kingdom, a composition drawn from Isaiah 11:6 to 8 that he painted roughly sixty two times between about 1820 and his death in 1849, using his trade to produce religious teaching rather than ornament.
That a recorded minister whose own community held reservations about painting as a trade became known chiefly for a devotional image painted dozens of times over marks Hicks's career as a documented case of a Quaker minister turning a trade his own tradition viewed with suspicion into an instrument of the ministry it supported.