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.
Reviews
On Edward Hicks is a story of everything. Here's antebellum America itching for a fight with itself, with one public figure hooked between community and conscience, hoarding a few delicious hours alone, for pictures. -- Brandt Junceau * Brooklyn Rail *
Edward Hicks painted dozens of versions of his "Peaceable Kingdom," and I never thought about one until I read Sanford Schwartz's remarkable new book, On Edward Hicks, a scholarly page-turner that makes 19th-century American art new again. -- Deborah Solomon



Book Information
ISBN 9781646570065
Author Edward Hicks
Format Hardback
Page Count 152
Imprint Marquand Books Inc
Publisher Marquand Books Inc