The Cornell Farm

Cows, sheep, horses and pigs stand closely together in a band across the bottom of the picture, as if posed for a group portrait, while two dozen cream, tawny, russet and speckled cattle fill the left, white sheep and black pigs cluster beyond, and nine horses and foals gather at the right — all beneath rolling green lawns, farm buildings and a pale pink sky. Edward Hicks, the Quaker minister whose Peaceable Kingdoms made him the most celebrated American folk painter, paid close attention to each animal; behind them the farmer James C. Cornell of Northampton, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, stands gesturing at his livestock with quiet pride. The inscription along the bottom records that the view, painted in Hicks’s sixty-ninth year, was of the farm “that took the Premium in the Agricultural society, october the 12, 1848” — Hicks considered this calm, harmonious scene one of his finest works. The canvas passed from Cornell’s family through his granddaughter to Edgar and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch in 1954, who gave it to the National Gallery of Art in 1964. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.