Sanford Schwartz explores the trailblazing career of 19th-century Quaker folk artist Edward HicksEdward Hicks (1780-1849) was the creator of one of the most familiar scenes in American art: the Peaceable Kingdom, which depicts a realm where wild and flesh-eating animals come together with defenseless creatures, and will not harm them. Because Hicks was a Quaker minister, his many renderings of the scene have been taken as largely a self-taught artist's professions of Quaker pacifism.But here, author and curator Sanford Schwartz, in a wide-ranging study that for the first time looks at Hicks as an imaginative artist as well as a minister, shows how the Peaceable Kingdom paintings-there are some 60 examples, made over 30 years-tell a richer story. In Schwartz's hands, Hicks emerges as a person and a painter who hardly seems to be of the past.