A lion lies down next to a lamb. A child leads them both, with a river winding past green hills behind them. This same scene, more or less, was painted by one man more than 60 separate times.
What you're looking at
Edward Hicks, a Quaker minister and sign and coach painter from Pennsylvania, painted this version of The Peaceable Kingdom around 1816-18 — the Cleveland Museum of Art, which now holds it, considers it likely the very first painting in the series. It illustrates the prophecy from Isaiah 11:6, that a wolf will live with a lamb, a leopard will lie down with a young goat, and a little child will lead them — a vision of a world where natural enemies stop being enemies.
A minister who kept repainting the same hope
Hicks wasn't a trained fine artist in the traditional sense; he apprenticed to coach makers as a young teenager and spent years as a house, coach, and sign painter, and his style has the flat, direct clarity of that trade rather than academic polish. He became a recorded Quaker minister in his early thirties, and it was as a preacher, not a painter, that his contemporaries most remembered him. But he returned to this exact subject, animals of prey and their natural prey lying peacefully together, again and again over more than three decades, adjusting the animals, the children, and the background scene each time. For Hicks, painting wasn't separate from preaching — this was a sermon he kept re-delivering in paint.
Later in the series, Hicks began adding a small background vignette showing William Penn's 1682 treaty with the Lenape people, adapted from Benjamin West's earlier painting of the same event, tying the Biblical prophecy of peace to his own Quaker community's history in Pennsylvania. This particular canvas predates that addition — behind the animals here, Hicks painted only a quiet river landscape.
One detail to look for
Count the animals gathered around the child. Hicks fills the foreground with lion, ox, wolf, lamb, and leopard resting together — natural predators and prey drawn straight from Isaiah's prophecy, each pairing a small, separate illustration of the same single promise.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original — 47.6 x 59.7 cm — so what you're hanging is honestly scaled to the painting Hicks made. Shop the canvas print.