Lot 456: EDWARD HICKS (1780-1849)

THE GRAVE OF WILLIAM PENN

23 1/2 by 31 1/4 in. (59.7 by 79.4cm)

indistinctly inscribed... Buckinghamshire, l.c. also inscribed Painted by Edw. Hicks in the 68th year of his age/for his friend Joshua Longstreth of Philada. on the stretcher.
oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Joshua Longstreth, Philadelphia (gift from the artist)
Mr. and Mrs. Owen Winston, New York, 1920s (through Edward Hicks Carle, brother of Robert W. Carle)
John Winston (their son), Gladstone, New Jersey
Mrs. John Winston (his wife), Gladstone, New Jersey
Mrs. David Callard (their daughter), Bethesda, Maryland
Andrew Crisp Gallery, New York

EXHIBITED

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Institute, Three Self-Taught Pennsylvania Artists, n.d.
New York, United States Section of the International Commission on Folk Art, Exhibition of Folk Art, 1935
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art
Springfield, Massachusetts, Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, Landscape Painting 1800-1900, January-February 1938, no. 10, p. 25 (as The Home of William Penn)
Princeton, New Jersey, Squibb Art Gallery, American Painting: A Gathering from Three Centuries (organized by the Historical Society of Princeton), October 1975, no. 29
New York, Andrew Crispo Gallery, 19th and 20th Century Americans, April-May 1979, no 44
New York, Andrew Crispo Gallery (and traveling), American Masters of the 19th and 20th Centuries, January-February 1982

LITERATURE

Frederick Newlin Price, Edward Hicks 1780-1849, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 1945, no. 23, p. 26
Eleanor Price Mather and Dorothy Canning Miller, Edward Hicks: His Peaceable Kingdoms and Other Painting, Newark, New Jersey, 1983, p. 187, no. 98, illustrated

NOTE

Painted in 1847

According to Eleanor Price Mather: "Hicks derives his composition from Paul Gauci's lithograph after a painting by the Dutch artist Hendrick Frans de Cort. The original is now at teh Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, the gift of Granville Penn, descendant of the founder.

"The artist has several contemporaries named Joshua Longstreth. This one was probably the father-in-law of his friend Richard Price. In a letter to the latter, Hicks refers to his elderly friend as 'having a taste for farming and cattle,' and describes the print source of these works as 'the handsomest English landscape I ever saw.' That it was the final resting place of his great here, Penn, increased its appeal. The bull's darkening coat may reflect the painter's sense of his own approaching death" (Mather, pp. 184-186).