Peaceable Kingdom

Edward Hicks

National Gallery of Art

Three small children with pale pink skin sit and stand among a group of animals to our right as a group of eight indigenous people with light brown skin gather with eight white-skinned men near a riverbank in the distance to our left in this horizontal painting. The children and animals take up the right two-thirds of the composition. They gather on a flat-topped spit of land, which is covered in grass. All three children have blond hair and rounded features. Two sit on the ground at the bottom center of the painting. The largest animal is a caramel-brown bull, which stands next to a pale golden lion. The other animals are smaller in scale, and include a tiger, wolf, sheep, goats, cows, bears, and a jaguar, all sitting or standing at rest around the bull and lion. At the top center of the group of animals, one child stands over the lion’s back and has one arm around the tiger’s shoulders, and another child at the lower center touches the jaguar’s nose. A tree with olive-green, rust-red, and harvest-yellow leaves grows up the right edge of the canvas, in front of a tall, forest-green bush. On another spit of flat-topped, elevated grassy land to our left, six of the indigenous people stand in a row, wearing feathered headdresses. Two more kneel in front, creating a U-shape. The two in front wear loin cloths, and all eight wear gold earrings and necklaces. They face a gathering of eight men wearing tricorn hats, long coats, waistcoats, knee-length britches, and stockings in shades of gray, blue, white, brown, and orange. One of these men hold up a roll of cloth lifted out of a chest. Trees with spindly trunks and golden yellow canopies reach into the top corner of the painting along the left edge. The river extends into the distance beyond this group, with pale, sage-green hills carpeted in trees. Puffy white clouds float across a sky that deepens from pale shell pink along the horizon to light blue along the top. The features of the animals and children are painted simply and appear rather flat, giving them an almost cartoonish look.