The Peaceable Kingdom

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 better known in his own lifetime as a Quaker minister than as a painter, and it shows in what he chose to paint over and over. Recorded a minister of the Religious Society of Friends in 1812, he traveled and preached for years before the composition that would define him took hold: a scene of natural enemies at peace, drawn from Isaiah, chapter eleven, the wolf beside the lamb, the leopard beside the young goat, a small child leading them all.

He painted some sixty two versions of it between about 1820 and his death in 1849, no two identical, the animals rearranged and the background details shifted from canvas to canvas. The years he spent on the series were also the years his own religious community came apart. In 1827 the Society of Friends split into two camps, the Hicksites, named for his elderly cousin Elias Hicks, and the Orthodox, who wanted more formal structure in worship. Edward Hicks watched people he had preached beside for decades sort themselves into opposing sects, and by his own account it discouraged him from continuing to preach at all.

He kept painting the peaceable kingdom anyway. Art historians read the choice as more than coincidence: a man who could not mend his own community's rift painted, again and again, a vision of creatures that by nature could not get along, getting along. Several versions place a small scene in the background, William Penn shaking hands with the Lenape in 1682, tying the biblical promise to a specific, remembered peace on Pennsylvania soil rather than leaving it purely abstract.

The 1834 canvas now held by the National Gallery of Art is one entry in that long, repeated attempt, painted while the schism was still fresh and its outcome still uncertain.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

No other American folk painter is remembered for one composition the way Edward Hicks is remembered for this one. Roughly sixty two surviving canvases repeat the same core cast, a wolf and a lamb, a leopard and a young goat, a calf and a lion, a small child leading them, spread across nearly thirty years of his working life. They were not commissions in the ordinary sense. Hicks made most of them as gifts, for friends and fellow Quakers, which is part of why so many still exist scattered across different collections.

The 1834 version now at the National Gallery of Art belongs to the middle of that long run, painted seven years after the Hicksite Orthodox split. Museums holding other versions, the Metropolitan Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum among them, read the paintings the same way: the series tracks Hicks working through a real rupture rather than illustrating a fixed idea once and repeating it unchanged.

What shifts from canvas to canvas is instructive. The animals rearrange themselves. Some versions include the William Penn treaty vignette in the background; others leave it out. Later versions, painted closer to his death, are often read as more resigned, less certain the peace they depict was coming.

Taken together the sixty two canvases function less like a single finished statement and more like a running argument Hicks kept having with himself, in paint, using the same few words from Isaiah every time and never quite finishing the sentence.