Painting Review: The Peaceable Kingdom, By Edward Hicks

Words: 1150
Pages: 5

The Peaceable Kingdom, oil on canvas by Edward Hicks is a series of paintings and metaphor for an idealized nation where all people would live together in a condition of equality and without persecution. Edward Hicks is an American folk painter and the minister of the Friends society. He became a Quaker icon because of all of his paintings. This painting is a very unique painting by the use of color and lines that are suggested in the artwork. The real question is what does art work and artist mean to his viewers?
The subject of The Peaceable Kingdom is am image that is related to a verse in the Bible, Isaiah 11:6-8, “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatted calf together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. Christ and the apostles stand out at the
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Implied lines are lines that the view cannot actually see but knows they are there by the way the painter painted the images. Implied lines are more so are the child and the animals because the hill that he is standing on is more horizontal and he is holding onto the grapevine seeing that the hill is going down or is slanted. The actual lines are lines that you can see in the painting. The actual lines are suggested throughout the painting. For example, the way the tree branches are pointing to the apostles and the people slowly begin to disappear in the dark cloud. The space in this artwork shows that there is two different messages to be depicted in the artwork. The huge gaps between the two images state the peace in the air and surroundings in the images suggest that. The artist has a very brilliant use of light and