Edward Hicks (1780-1849)

Recollections of Bob Carlen

He was my father so, of course, I thought him handsome, brilliant, and funny. He loved, in no particular order, his family, the paintings of Hicks and Pippin, Pennsylvania Dutch Antiques (quilts and weathervanes in partiuclar), opera (which he sang at the top of his lungs in the car on Sunday afternoon drives), and small animals (you could catch him feeding strays outside the back door late at night). Because he came from a poor family, he was self educated. He had a photographic memory, reading art and history until late at night in the stacks of the Philadelphia library and retaining it all. And, finally, he was a born teacher, leading my sister and me through museums with a magnifying glass when we were children, demostrating how the brush applied the paint to the canvas. I watched him, late in his life, gather a crowd of 30 or more, as he, unselfconsciously, lectured his way through an exhibit of the Rockefeller Collection (John D III had been a client of his) at the San Francisco Museum.

He owned, in his lifetime, thirty-three paintings by Edward Hicks; they were everywhere in our house, and this Peaceable Kingdom, that my mother sells now, was his favorite. He bought it in 1949 from his friend David Ellinger, a Bucks County dealer. I was eight years old so I grew up with this painting always hanging in our living room, always a part of my life, and now of my father's legacy.

Nancy Carlen, September 2005

on the original chrome-red stretchers inscribed in Hicks’ hand: Peaceable Kingdom/ Painted by Edward Hicks in the 66^th year of his age.
Painted 1846-1847.

In his lifetime, legendary art dealer Robert Carlen (1906-1990) located more than half of the known works by American folk artist Edward Hicks (1780-1849); at last count 62 have been found. Carlen’s search for Hicks works spanned decades and helped to build his reputation as a leading dealer in American folk art. In numerous cases, Carlen bought paintings from the descendants of the original owners.

Though he had many of Hicks’s works in his possession, Carlen only kept one—a Peaceable Kingdom done in the artist’s “66^th year”, which Alice Ford deems “a precious legacy.”[1] Carlen purchased the work from his friend and Bucks County dealer David Ellinger in 1949. Considered “psychologically the most powerful of the Kingdoms,”[2] it graced Carlen’s living room until it was loaned to the Diplomatic Rooms at the State Department in 1976 to 2000 as part of the government’s Americana Project.(4)

Carlen brought Hicks to the attention of the art world and its patrons by the 1940s. He recalled in a 1985 interview how he had to initially convince his clients about the importance of the artist.[3]  Carlen considered Hicks “the American Rousseau” and held the “Hicks Centennial Exhibition” at the Robert Carlen Gallery in Philadelphia, 1949.[4] Today Hicks is considered the quintessential American folk artist. In the nineteenth-century, he was recognized for his Quaker ministry rather than the engaging simplicity of his easel work.

Edward was born to Isaac and Catharine Hicks in Bucks County, Pennsylvania on April 4, 1780. Soon after the untimely death of his mother, Edward’s father remarried. Unable to support his children, Isaac sent three-year-old Edward to live with a business acquaintance David Twining and his wife Elizabeth in Newtown, Pennsylvania.  The Twinings introduced Edward to the Society of Friends.      

For seven years starting in 1793, Hicks apprenticed with coach makers William and Henry Tomlinson in Langhorne, near Newtown. Hicks’s talent for coach and sign painting not only gave him the means to support his family but would eventually provide an artistic language in which he could express his religious convictions. His understanding of color and his adroitness for lettering, particularly with the difficult combination of black on yellow, became a signature technique found in numerous Kingdoms.

As a man of twenty-three, Hicks became a member of the Middletown Monthly Meeting and married Sarah Worstall. His growing involvement with his faith led to his ordination as a minister by 1811. That year he also opened his own shop as a decorative painter and eventually found himself criticized by the Friends for transgressing the bounds of Quaker simplicity. While ornamental painting was an acceptable trade to the Friends, it had to adhere to their general guidelines for attitudes and behavior known as the “Rules of Discipline”. Effected by their condemnation, and in arrears, Hicks quit his shop and became a farmer, a vocation he believed to be more consistent for a Christian. With the assistance of friends and family, Hicks paid down his debt and returned to decorative painting at least to a modest extent by mid-1816.

During his short-lived career as a farmer, Hicks entered a pivotal relationship with his older cousin the Quaker minister Elias Hicks of Long Island, New York. The two remained close until Elias’s death in 1830. The elder Hicks was at the center of the schism within the Friends. Followers of the elder Hicks were known as Hicksites, with Edward being one. Like his cousin, Edward believed many Friends had strayed from the traditions practiced by their forefathers, William Penn, George Fox, and Robert Barclay. These leaders and their beliefs were fundamental to the creation of Hicks’s greatest artistic achievements, namely his series of Kingdoms, which he produced for nearly thirty years, until the night before he died.

With the Kingdoms Hicks reconciled his love of art and the faith to which he dedicated himself. Their naive, flat style, make the Kingdoms deceptively simple in appearance and meaning to contemporary audiences. Their richness, however, would have been understood by nineteenth-century Quakers. Though he painted other easel subjects, Hicks refined his deepest spiritual beliefs and expectations for peace within the Friends community on the Kingdom canvases. To relay his point of view in agreeable terms to the Friends, Hicks brought to life the prophecy of Isaiah 11:6-9

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’s den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my hold mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.[5]

The prophecy wholly supported Elias Hicks’s teaching that individuals need to overcome the “animal propensities and passions in their nature.”[6]

The Kingdoms were layered with Hicks’s knowledge of medieval humoralism. The four humors: melancholy, sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric were represented in the animal kingdom by the wolf, leopard, bear and lion, respectively. The inner character of the animals is seen in their faces and in their movements. Over time, the facial expressions, physical movements and proximity of one animal to another changes. These transitions divide the series of paintings into the Early, Middle and Later Kingdoms, and divine the whole body of work as a dynamic artistic expression of a life and the history of the Society of Friends in America.

The Later Kingdoms (1835-1849) were created during the last phase of Hicks’s life when the artist-minister turned his attentions inward to find his own “Inner Light” through prayer and introspection. Eleanore Price Mather and Dorothy Canning Miller refer to these paintings as the “Kingdoms of Departure.” [7] Their tone is one of resignation and acceptance that peace could only be reached if the Friends “fully relinquished their self-will to the will of God.”[8] They are marked by a shift from the uneasy peace evidenced in the Middle Kingdoms where the animals were alert with trepidation. In particular, the lion which dominates the Later Kingdoms has mellowed in appearance, giving these works a serene feeling that makes them more akin to the Early Kingdoms.

Elements from the Early Kingdoms reemerged and were integrated with significant symbols employed in the Middle Kingdoms. Hicks reaffirmed his desire for a harmonious life by restoring Penn’s Treaty to the composition and combining it with the image of Elias Hicks and the other Quaker forefathers who peopled the middle period’s Banner Kingdoms. The branch of grapes also reappeared to remind viewers of the redemptive blood of Christ. Every Quaker, including Hicks, truly would be a Christian when he overcame his natural animal propensities.

The addition of the lioness tending to her cubs noted the importance of women and children to the future of the Friends. Hicks’s hopes were now hinged on the youth and the ability of their elders to raise them in their faith as advocated by their forefathers. As he declared in his Memoirs towards the end of his life

…parents, guardians, and the head of families [should] consider themselves as delegated shepherds…charged with the care of a flock of lambs…for whose present and everlasting welfare they are in a certain degree responsible....Such as are thus exercised will be kind, affectionate, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, and be the happy instruments of kindling on the altar of the child’s heart, the same devotional flame that glows within their own breast.[9]

Incorporating new symbols as well as evolving his compositional techniques evidence the continuous refinement of Hicks’s thinking and draftsmanship. The animals now spread out from the right to the left side of the canvass. “Animation—truly suspended—and a new mobility lend an air of spontaneity that almost belies a reliance on prints.”[10] The alteration of the landscape along with the transformation of the animals not only document a personal view of the Friends in nineteenth-century America but Hicks’s ever-striving to improve as both man and artist.
Bibliography
Carlen Galleries, Inc., Records, 1775-1997. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Carlen, Nancy. Recollections of Robert Carlen, 2005.
Conger, Clement E., Chairman, Fine Arts Committee, Department of State, to “Friend of the Americana Project”, March 22, 1974 and September 9, 1974. Carlen Galleries, Inc., Records, 1775-1997. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Ford, Alice. Edward Hicks: His Life and Art. New York: Abbeville Press, 1985.
Gaines, Catherine S. Finding Aid to the Carlen Galleries, Inc., Records, 1775-1997. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 2002.  http://www.aaa.si.edu/findaids/carlgall/carlgall.htm, November 13, 2005.
Hicks, Edward.  Memoirs of the Life and Religious Labors of Edward Hicks, Late of Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, PA: Merrihew & Thompson, Printers, 1851.
Mather, Eleanore Price and Dorothy Canning Miller. Edward Hicks: His Peaceable Kingdoms and Other Paintings. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1983.
Stover, Catharine. Interview with Robert Carlen. Smithsonian Archives of American Art,   June 28, 1985. http://artarchives.si.edu/oralhist/carlen85.htm, November 13, 2005.
Weekley, Carolyn J. The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1999.

[1] Alice Ford, Edward Hicks: His Life and Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), p. 202.
[2] Eleanore Price Mather and Dorothy Canning Miller, Edward Hicks: His Peaceable Kingdoms and Other Paintings (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1983), p. 151.
[3] Robert Carlen interview by Catharine Stover for Smithsonian Archives of American Art, June 28, 1985.
[4] Mather and Miller, Edward Hicks, p. 151.
[5]  The Holy Bible, Containing All the Books of The Old and New Testaments, King James Version (New York: Viking Studio, 1999), p. 567.
[6] Weekley, The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks, p. 42.
[7] Mather and Miller as cited in Weekley, Kingdoms of Edward Hicks, p. 151.
[8] Weekley, Kingdoms of Edward Hicks, p. 154.
[9] Edward Hicks, Memoirs of the Life and Religious Labors of Edward Hicks, Late of Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Merrihew & Thompson, Printers, 1851), pp. 116-117.
[10] Ford, Edward Hicks: His Life and Art, p. 202.