Category: itinerant painters

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Itinerant painters (2 of 2)

This version of The Peaceable Kingdom, from the mid-1840s, includes William Penn negotiating with Native Americans. He often included this in the paintings as an example of how disparate peoples could work together in peace.
Perhaps the most famous early American itinerant painter was the Quaker pastor, Edward Hicks.

Hicks was born in 1780 to Anglican parents, but his mother’s early death resulted in him being raised in a Quaker family.
An earlier iteration shows the influence of decorative painting on Hicks’ canvas work. We call him ‘primitive’ but his interest in design over realism actually seems very modern in retrospect.
At the age of 13, Hicks was apprenticed to a coach-making firm, where he learned the craft of decorative painting. He stayed there for seven years before moving on as a journeyman coach and house painter. He was accepted into the Society of Friends in 1803 and married a fellow Quaker that same year.
By 1813, Hicks was traveling as an itinerant preacher. Like St. Paul supporting his ministry with tent-making, Hicks supported his ministry with decorative painting. This, unfortunately, annoyed some of his Quaker brethren, who felt that decorative painting was at odds with Quaker principles. He gave up painting in favor of farming, but that decision was a financial disaster.
This version of The Peaceable Kingdom, from 1829-30, includes Quakers bearing banners.
Unlike St. Paul, Hicks had a growing family. Necessity forced him to resume decorative painting. He reeled off the first of many copies of The Peaceable Kingdom by 1820. Ironically, most of his canvases were not done for money, but for the edification of friends and family. In his lifetime, he was known as a preacher, and his living came from painting decorative objects.
Hicks painted an astonishing 61 iterations of The Peaceable Kingdom, which illustrates Isaiah 11:6-8:
The wolf will live with the lamb,
    the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
    and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
    their young will lie down together,
    and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
    and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
That he painted it over and over tells us much about his intention, which was to share and teach the Bible. It was a humble aspiration in opposition to his contemporary art scene (which I wrote about in a series of posts starting here).

The Cornell Farm, 1848. Hicks may not have had the classically-trained artist’s ability to render spatial depth in a landscape, but he sure did understand animals. 

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Itinerant painters (1 of 2)

Historical Monument of the American Republic, finally finished in 1888, was Field’s most famous painting. It was rejected for the Centennial Exposition, which it was painted to commemorate.
As I traveled from event to event this summer, people would ask me whether I was interested in doing this or that upcoming show. With the rise of plein air events, it would be easy to carve out a life as an itinerant painter, going from place to place all year long. I’m not planning to do it, but we have a tradition of itinerant painters in this country and its romance does kind of bewitch me.

Erastus Salisbury Field was a 19th century itinerant folk painter. Most of Field’s life was spent in western Massachusetts and the Connecticut Valley, although he did do two stints in New York City.
Woman with a Green Book (possibly Louisa Gallond Cook), 1838, was one of many itinerant portraits painted by Field before photography made this business obsolete.
By age 19, Field had displayed sufficient drawing chops to be taken as a student by Samuel F. B. Morse—yes, that Morse, who was a well-known painter and teacher besides being the inventor of the single-wire telegraph and the Morse code. Field’s few short months with Morse were the sum total of his formal education in painting. After Morse abruptly closed his teaching studio, Field returned to Massachusetts with enough technique to set up shop as an itinerant decorative painter and portrait painter.

In the 1840s, Field answered the siren call of New York again, relocating his family to Greenwich Village. After seven years, he was called back to Massachusetts to manage his ailing father’s farm.
The Garden of Eden, c. 1860, by Erastus Field.
It’s believed that Field studied the nascent art of photography in New York, but whether that’s true or not, he certainly saw the handwriting on the wall. He turned from painting portraits to painting landscapes and history and Bible scenes. His most famous work, The Historical Monument of the American Republic, is a complex metaphor for American history. He worked on it for 21 years. He was a terrifically productive painter, with about 300 works still surviving.

Field died at home on June 28, 1900 at the age of 95.

Field’s granddaughter-several-times-removed was my friend in Lewiston in the 1980s. She was also a talented and largely self-trained artist.
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