In this multilayered scene, Edward Hicks—a Quaker minister, sign and coach painter, and artist—depicts a menagerie of animals peacefully coexisting in the edenic landscape of the so-called New World. A lion with expressive eyes poses between an ox and a bear as children frolic among other large cats, a sheep, a wolf, and a goat. In the background, Hicks included a vignette purported to depict the legendary meeting of William Penn and the Lenni Lenape peoples under an elm tree at Shackamaxon on the Delaware River in 1682. Hicks based his imagery on an engraving after Benjamin West’s painting Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771−72; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), in which Penn is seen peacefully trading gifts for the land that would become Pennsylvania. Hicks similarly mythologized the benevolent nature of such encounters, erasing the coercive and violent realities of settler colonialism.
The artist also drew inspiration from the Book of Isaiah, which is cited on the back of his handmade frame as “The Peaceable Kingdom, ISAH. 11.6.7.8.,” and states:
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.
This text was significant to the devout Hicks, who painted more than 100 versions of the scene during the last three decades of his life. Beyond these specific references, however, his allegories of earthly harmony, depictions of abundant natural resources, and naïvely whimsical animals appealed to Euro-American viewers both before and after Hicks’s time.
Selected Bibliography
Ford, Alice. Edward Hicks, His Life and Art. Abbeville Press, 1985.
Mather, Eleanore Price, and Dorothy Canning Miller. Edward Hicks, His Peaceable Kingdoms and Other Paintings. University of Delaware Press, 1983.
Weekley, Carolyn J. The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks. Abrams, 1999.
Selected Exhibition History
The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Williamsburg, Virginia, February−September 1999.