ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: Edward Hicks
Edward Hicks (1780-1849) was an American painter known for his naive depictions of the farms and landscapes of Pennsylvania and New York, and especially for his many versions of the Peaceable Kingdom, an eschatological state inferred from texts such as the Book of Isaiah. The Cornell Farm, oil on canvas by Edward Hicks (1848) National Gallery of Art, Washington DC He is sometimes considered a primitive painter due to the depiction of the “state of nature” they found in Pennsylvania ( Penn – Sylvania, from Latin silva: (rain)forest), which must have been an area of outstanding natural beauty. Naive features can be seen in the tendency toward the use of brilliant, saturated colours, rather than more subtle mixtures and tones, as well as the characteristic absence of perspective and the sense of still space. His works bear a slight resemblance to the paintings of the French artist Henri Rousseau. He is also called a ‘folk’ painter, perhaps due to his wish to preserve his rel