Edward Hicks

Edward Hicks (1780-1849), a farmer's son, was apprenticed to a coachbuilder and began his self-taught career with signs and coach-painting. Becoming a Quaker and renowned itinerant preacher in the northern USA and southern Canada, he returned to painting as a way to show that a good Christian must earn his living with his own hands. He painted his beliefs: religion and peaceful co-operation, making more than twenty versions of The Peaceable Kingdom in which all creation lives in harmony.