Szopka Part 2: A Kingdom Peaceable

Edward Hicks

In the neighborhood of my childhood, in a friend’s house, over a brick mantel hangs a print of Edward Hick’s Peaceable Kingdom. At the edge of a forest colonists and Indians huddle under an elm tree, while in the foreground an odd assortment of beasts, conducted by a pudgy infant, stare back at the viewer. A varnish paralyzes the actors and the entire mise-en-scene, like flies in amber. 

Similar in effect to Paul Gauguin’s romantic vision of Polynesia, or Henri Rousseau’s work, (both of which came later), Hick’s pallet and child-like naïveté charm the spectator and instigate nostalgia for a history to which they may have no connection. The Kingdoms stink of late summer melancholy. The velveteen meadow invites caress. We’ve returned to the garden before The Fall, discovered Arcadia.

For those of us born in the 20^th century, who feasted on the illustrations of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, Hick’s work strikes oddly familiar, like finding your profile in a moldy daguerreotype. Sendak’s book, however, entertains domination of the id by ego. Max, deep in the wilderness of imagination, nearly succumbs to its intoxication. He saves himself when he commands his inner demons to “Be Still!” In this exclamation, the most courageous of utterances, is the distillate of the civilizing process. 

Hick’s vocabulary functions in a similar way to Sendak's, but with a different idea of the civilizing process. Hick's child, though seemingly powerless and lacking identity, coerces a lion into playing nice with bovine prey. Rebellion in Hick’s world is the antithesis of harmony, the Quaker ideal of spiritual “quietism.” After Sendak’s Max makes mischief he is condemned to his room without supper, called a “wild thing” by his mother, a reproach he  shamelessly counters with: “I’ll eat you up!” The gravity of the situation, fertile soil for true horror, is softened by Sendak’s hand. 

Hick’s child is a genderless doll, porcelain and pink cheeked. A wingless cherub dropped from heaven. Innocence underscored by innocence itself, almost with irony, but not. Every brush is in earnest. We walk away with, rather than a smirk, an aftertaste of shame at having doubted intentions.

A Shock of Paradox.

The white man, William Penn, sports a tri-corn hat and shakes hands with Tamanend, chief of the Turtle Clan of the Lenni Lanape. These Lanape (Delaware) Indians, draped in blankets, crowned with feathers, hold a smoking calumet to seal the agreement. The portrayal is humane, hopeful: two distinct cultures willfully agreeing to tolerate each other. The time is the beginning of the eighteenth century at Shackamaxon in Eastern Pennsylvania. 

There’s skepticism over Hick’s portrayal. Some doubt that the event ever happened at all given the lack of official documentation. Even the historic wampum belt that “contained” the treaty has been lost. Whose account do we believe? Native oral tradition that confirms “The Great Treaty” might as well be trusted. The absence of direct written testimony says nothing given the audacity of settlers whose duplicity relied on skillfully crafted documents in the first place. Most of the written documentation available attests to nothing more than centuries of larceny.

Artist Benjamin West imagined this diplomatic benchmark, this “treaty vignette,” years before Hicks, and Hicks borrowed freely from West’s treatment. By the time Hicks painted his first Peaceable Kingdom, a hundred years had passed since William Penn’s “Great Law” of tolerant inclusion, and sixty years since that final blood-letting, the end of the French-Indian War that cemented British rule. Worse, the decades between Penn’s Experiment and the war could hardly be called peaceable. Countless failures of diplomacy, treaty breaking, revenge, raids, rapes, and massacres, mostly instigated by colonists, help characterize that century in not such a favorable light. Hicks neglected all this in-between history. His work memorializes a single instance of light in an otherwise grim, but not surprising, story.

In most of the multiple variations of The Peaceable Kingdom, Hick’s “treaty vignette” is only a part of the landscape. Upstaging this wax museum moment is our angelic child and the top to bottom food-chain. There's often a bear and leopard, a goat and lamb in the mix. The animals are cuddly and button eyed, the humans stiff and poised. All are toy-like. Between Kingdom variations, people and animals come and go in number and variety, but all feature the child and the iconic ox and lion. Were it not for the toddler, what bloodshed might follow? The paired beasts, contrite but game, remind me of embarrassed teens splitting a malted. As if in explanation, Hicks adds Isaiah’s prophecy:

And a little child shall lead them…
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

Beautiful Obsessive

Hicks re-imaged his Peaceable Kingdom over sixty times across three decades (1816-1849). His day job involved detailing coaches and furniture, adorning hope chests with flowers and gold leaf. His obsession, in part, reveals a love of painting not held in esteem among his peers. Though not forbidden, making art was considered “superfluous” by Quakers. Hicks was a devoted and beloved minister who was shamed by his vocation, a skill he’d taken up before he’d formally entered into the Society of Friends. He made promises time and time again to quit painting. At one point he tried his hand at the honest vocation of farming only to fail, returning to his pallet and brushes as if directed by an unseen hand. 

Revisiting the tableau of The Peaceable Kingdom over and over again, year after year, the artist exercised his mastery of technique. Comparisons reveal experiments in perspective and texture. But ignoring these superficial differences and taking account of biography, one witnesses a chronicle of discord between the painter and his community, and, even more strikingly, the circuitous trajectory of history though that chunk of time. Here, in these meadows at the forest’s edge, the awakening of progressive ethics, the Rights Revolution, leaves its footprint. 

Dwelling on the autobiographical and the sociopolitical satisfies the critic and sociologist, or the activist with an axe to grind, but what I find most striking is the mystery of the recursive return to the same story over and over again. In any case, I don’t wish to flatten Hick’s uncanny work, disembowel it, sap it of its potential for wonderment. To reduce a work of art is an anathema to my discourse here. However, to dislocate art from experience, from history and social evolution—The Art for Art’s sake position—I consider equally reductive, anti-intellectual, shallow and dangerous.

Evidenced in the recursive Kingdoms is Hick's unwillingness to let go. He must hold on to a moment by revisiting it. A willful deflection of laws that govern space and time. In art, of course, these laws don’t exist except to be broken. As William Faulkner affirmed, “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”