Imperturbable Innocence

By ROBERT HUGHES

"I have nothing to depend on but the mercy and forgiveness of God," wrote Edward Hicks when the shadow of death was upon him, "for I have no works of righteousness of my own. I am nothing but a poor old worthless insignificant painter." This may be as fine a case of being one's own harshest critic as the annals of American art can offer. When Hicks died in 1849, in his 70th year, more than 3,000 people came to his funeral--an imposing turnout today, but a prodigious crowd then. They did not come to honor an artist, however. They were paying their respects to the best Quaker preacher in Bucks County, Pa.

Today, that reason for Hicks' fame has utterly vanished. The only people who read his sermons are art historians searching for iconographic clues to his paintings. One example: "Finally, my friends, farewell! May the melancholy be encouraged and the sanguine quieted; may the phlegmatic be tendered and the choleric humbled; may self be denied and the cross of Christ worn as a daily garment; may His peaceable kingdom forever be established in the rational, immortal soul." To Hicks' own mind, the clues were all meant quite literally. In a sermon at Goose Creek Meeting in Virginia, he explained that the traditional four humors common to all mankind can be symbolized by specific beasts: the melancholy humor by the gloomy and avaricious wolf, the sanguine by the lustful and volatile leopard, the phlegmatic by the lumbering bear, the choleric by the proud lion. In the Peaceable Kingdom, these beasts would be spiritually reborn and would He down in tranquillity with their domestic opposites: the lamb, the kid, the cow, the ox.

Arcadia Restored. The gentle, stiff cadences of Hicks' sermons are at one with the awkwardly tender forms of his paintings: they promise a fulfilled world where the humors are no longer at war, where mind is no longer in conflict with body--in short, an earthly paradise, that fantasy of a prelapsarian Arcadia restored in the wildernesses of the new world. No wonder Hicks looks so quaint in 1975. For 50 years since his "rediscovery," he has been thought to be the best of all American primitive painters whose works survive from the 19th century--not because he was a great instinctive draftsman like the Douanier Rousseau but because his whole way of imagining the world derives from a hope about human nature that is peculiarly and particularly American. If that view --along with the religious view that supported it--is now nearly as dead as the moon, it remains an aspiration that Americans cherish. Both to celebrate and remind, in this Bicentennial era, the Andrew Crispo gallery in New York is opening this week a major exhibition of Hicks' paintings, a collection of 37, about a third of his surviving works.

Hicks had a difficult upbringing. His father was a Crown official in Pennsylvania who lost his fortune after the British defeat. His mother died before he was two. Hicks was consigned to the care of a Quaker farmer named Twining (one of his best paintings is an evocation in retrospect of the old Twining farm). At 13 he was apprenticed to a coachmaker: a coarse life in which he was, as he later lamented, "introduced by lechers and debauchees into the worst of company and places." One Sunday morning, suffering from a bad hangover, he blundered into a Quaker meetinghouse and shortly thereafter joined the faith. He was 23 and very uncertain.

One day he rose in a meeting (in the Quaker meeting, a member is expected to speak only when he feels "moved"), and his speech was so exalted that the congregation declared he should speak in other places to spread the Quaker word. He did. But he continued to make his living as a painter of tavern signs, carriage decorations and furniture. In 1825, when he was 45, his faith and his painting skills found common ground. He would paint his (and the Quaker) vision of the Peaceable Kingdom. In this vision, Quaker Leader William Perm became the epitome of the peacemaker, specifically in his act of making a treaty of friendship with the Delaware Indians in 1682.

A Man Obsessed. Hicks painted such scenes over and over--there are some 60 known versions. While the peaceful animals dominate the foreground, Penn usually appears in the distance, negotiating with Indian chiefs. This portrait of Penn and the Indians actually derived from Benjamin West's painting of the same scene more than 50 years earlier. But simple reality meant little to Hicks--he was a man obsessed with his Utopia. Sometimes Hicks places this Utopia in an imaginary place, sometimes at Virginia's Natural Bridge (which Hicks never saw but adopted from an engraving), or the Delaware Water Gap (which he may not have seen either). He certainly had never seen the grave of his idol William Penn, who was eventually buried at Jordans, in Buckinghamshire, 30 miles northwest of London. With typical disregard for mere historical fact, Hicks has substituted a hedge for the wall that surrounds the burying ground. But then, Hicks has no great interest in natural fact either. The "elm" under which Penn was supposed to have made his deal with the Indians conforms to no botanical index and varies from painting to painting as it suits Hicks' compositional purposes.

Even his image of peace was not wholly consonant with his own way of life. He himself was quick-tempered, contentious (in those days the Quakers were divided into two hostile factions on a question of unpenetrable ecclesiastical complexity), and this contentiousness is reflected in the portrait of him done by his cousin and pupil, Thomas Hicks, then aged only 16.

Taken coldly, Hicks is not a great painter, not even a very good one. His lions were tabby cats. He could never manage to get that "little child who shall lead them" to get her feet on the ground--she floats like a misplaced cherub from some Italian fresco. But there remains an imperturbable innocence, a kind of faith in a land that never was and can never be, that disarms all criticism and inspires a belief in the unbelievable. . RobertHughes

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