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Portrait of Edward Hicks, C. 1836

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Portrait of Edward Hicks, C. 1836 Portrait of Edward Hicks, c. 1836 Thomas Hicks, 1823-1890 oil on canvas H. 36.125 x W. 29.125 inches Museum purchase funded by Eleanor K. Denoon, The Bella S. and Benjamin H. Garb Foundation Inc., Mr. and Mrs.Kenneth Gemmill, George S. Hobensack, Jr., Laurence D. Keller, William Mandell, Members of the Newtown Friends Meeting, Olde Hope Antiques, Inc., Residents of Pennswood Village, Eleanor and Malcolm Polis, Ms. Leslie E. Skilton, Kingdon Swayne, and Anonymous Donors Biography Thomas Hicks painted this portrait in about 1836. Thomas Hicks was born in Newtown, Pennsylvania, in 1823. He started painting coaches when he was a teenager alongside his cousin, artist Edward Hicks. One day Thomas painted a portrait of his employer, and it was so realistic that his father encouraged him to study art. He went to Philadelphia to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and to New York City to study at the National Academy of Design. He also toured Europe with friends of his that were artists, visited London, Florence and Rome, and then studied in Paris with Thomas Couture. It was in Paris that he was encouraged to use loose, lively brushwork and to work directly from nature. When Thomas Hicks returned from Europe, he set up an art studio in New York City. Thomas Hicks painted many scenes of everyday life, but he was most well known for his portraits. He painted many different people in his lifetime, many of whom were celebrities. He painted poet William Cullen Bryant, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, and British author Charles Dickens. Thomas Hicks became very famous for his portraits, and won many awards for his works of art. Thomas Hicks died in Trenton Falls, New York, in 1890. Is the person in this painting someone famous? The person in this painting is Edward Hicks. He was Thomas Hicks’ cousin. Edward Hicks is a famous American painter, most widely known for his images of people and animals living together peacefully in his Peaceable Kingdom paintings. Edward Hicks was born in 1780 in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. His mother died when he was an infant, so he was sent to live with family friends named the Look • Discover • Discuss 1 Twinings. He was lovingly raised in their home with their four daughters. The Twinings were Quakers. As a young boy Edward Hicks became an apprentice to a carriage maker, and decorated coaches, signs, and different kinds of furniture and household objects. As an adult, he spent a lot of time preaching throughout Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and as far away as Canada and Virginia, to share the knowledge and insights of his Quaker faith with others. He didn’t make much money preaching, so he began painting in order to earn “an honest living.” For him, painting was a way to find spiritual peace and to share that peace with his viewers. He painted in oil on wood or canvas. He liked to paint scenes from the Bible, stories from history, and big views of Bucks County farm life. He painted George Washington Crossing the Delaware River, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the Quaker William Penn signing a treaty with the Indians. He painted animals and people with realistic detail, but his use of perspective often seemed awkward. This is probably because he never received formal art training. He taught himself to paint the way many painters of his time learned, by copying paintings and prints made by other, more trained, artists. Because Hicks taught himself how to paint, today we call him a naïve painter. Edward Hicks is most widely known as the painter of Peaceable Kingdom. He painted more than one hundred different images of this famous story from the Book of Isaiah in the Bible. You may recognize the story of a world in which "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.” This story was a favorite among the Quakers because it told about a future world where animals and people lived together peacefully. His Peaceable Kingdom paintings are some of the most beloved in American art. Edward Hicks died in 1849. What is the man in this painting holding in his hand? Thomas Hicks was very good at telling you a lot about the sitters’ personalities in his paintings. To do this, he painted his portraits d’apparat. That is, he put props in his paintings that would tell us about the interests and achievements of his sitters. In this portrait of Thomas Hicks’ cousin, Edward Hicks, Thomas is showing Edward holding an artist’s palette in his left hand. Hand-held palettes have been used by artists since the 15th century. Originally, palettes were very small, square or paddle-shaped objects with a thumbhole. During this time artists would work only on one area of their painting at a time, so they didn’t need to put many colors on their palette at once. By the 19th century, when Thomas Hicks lived, larger oval or kidney-shaped palettes were fashionable. Made of wood, they were soaked in linseed oil and allowed to dry before use. The wood would harden, and the oil prevented the paint from being absorbed into the wood. Nowadays, wood palettes are sealed with polyurethane varnishes or lacquer. In addition, some palettes today are as large as a tabletop. This enables artists to arrange and mix Look • Discover • Discuss 2 several colors at a time, which frees them to work on many parts of their paintings simultaneously. The hole in the palette makes it easier to hold in one hand while the artist paints with the other hand. Can you see Edward’s thumb poking through the hole in this palette? Do you notice he is grasping three brushes with his thumb, and his right hand is free to hold the brush with which he is painting. By looking at this part of the Portrait of Edward Hicks, we can guess not only that he is a painter, but also that he is right-handed! Paint is arranged around the edges of the palette, and the center is usually left open for mixing colors. In Thomas Hicks’ time, most artists were working with oil paint. Oil paint does not dry out very quickly, so an artist could leave his or her palette uncovered on a table or at the easel in his or her artists’ studio for months. Artists arrange the colors on their palettes in many different ways. Some artists like to arrange their colors from light to dark and some separate warm and cool colors on their palettes. Each artist has his or her own way of arranging their colors on a palette. Today palettes are used by artists working in oil paints, acrylics and watercolors. Have you ever used an artists’ palette? Possibly not a wood one, like you see here, but most likely you have used something to hold and mix paints on when you are making a work of art. Paper plates, styrofoam trays, pie tins, waxed paper, aluminum foil, or pieces of metal, glass or tile all make good artist palettes. In today’s art supply stores, you can also purchase palettes made of plastic and disposable paper in a variety of shapes and sizes. Did anyone use a palette before the 15th century? The earliest palettes were probably used about 5000 years ago. Ancient Egyptians created palettes out of slate, and often carved them into beautiful shapes and decorated them with relief sculptures. They used their slate palettes to mix colors for a very different reason – make up! Men and women alike would grind green and black ores and stone into eye paint to wear for decorative purposes, to help with the glare of the sun (like football players wear today) and to prevent eye infections. One of the most famous of these palettes is The Palette of Narmer, made in about 3000 B.C., whose sculptures depict an important story about the history of Egypt. What else do you see in the Portrait of Edward Hicks that tells you about the sitter? What might you guess about Edward Hicks’ interests and accomplishments based on the objects placed in the painting? Is that a lion in the painting? Yes, there is a lion in the painting Edward Hicks is making in this portrait. A lion is traditionally thought of as a wild animal, “the king of the jungle.” Here Hicks Look • Discover • Discuss 3 paints it calmly sitting with other animals. Thomas is depicting his brother working on one of his famous Peaceable Kingdom paintings. What other animals do you see? Edward Hicks, the man in the painting, is most widely known as the painter of Peaceable Kingdom. He painted more than one hundred different images of this famous story from the Book of Isaiah in the Bible. About fifty of them still survive today. They were usually given as gifts or painted for relatives, neighbors, and friends who commissioned them. This story was a favorite among the Quakers because it told about a future world where animals and people live together peacefully. Sometimes he showed beautiful sunrises to symbolize the new world coming. His Peaceable Kingdom paintings are some of the most beloved in American art. I don’t know that much about Bible stories. What is the story of the peaceful world in the book of Isaiah? The peaceful world described in the Book of Isaiah is a world in which animals of all kinds live together in harmony. It is thought to be a hope for the future, even in Isaiah’s time! Here is the famous Bible story about the peaceful world Isaiah hoped for in the future: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf, and the young lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.
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