CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/15/2021

Tapping in to some welcome pacifism in 'On Edward Hicks'

Self-taught artist Horace Pippin's 1945 painting "Holy Mountain III" is reproduced from On Edward Hicks, Sanford Schwartz's illuminating study of the Quaker minister and ornamental sign painter Edward Hicks's most iconic work, "Peaceable Kingdom," and its many permutations. (Hicks painted more than sixty versions of the painting over the course of his lifetime, and it was adapted by many other artists, including Pippin, since the first iteration sometime around 1820.) "Presenting a dream of friendliness and serenity yet often tense and unsettling—and starring, as it were, an almost all-animal cast yet clearly about human experience—Edward Hicks’s many paintings entitled 'Peaceable Kingdom' might be called inside-out masterpieces," Schwartz writes. "In pictures set at the edge of a wood, we see an assembly of wild beasts, including a bear and a wolf, and of tame, or farm, animals, including a kid and a cow. They are living as a group, as the words 'peaceable kingdom' would suggest, in a domain where predators and their prey have come to coexist.
But the scenes, where the animals are often jumbled together, seem as much to show a peace conference that has only just gotten underway after a recent ceasefire. Harmony is less in the air than something unexpectedly realistic and psychological."