This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
No other American folk painter is remembered for one composition the way Edward Hicks is remembered for this one. Roughly sixty two surviving canvases repeat the same core cast, a wolf and a lamb, a leopard and a young goat, a calf and a lion, a small child leading them, spread across nearly thirty years of his working life. They were not commissions in the ordinary sense. Hicks made most of them as gifts, for friends and fellow Quakers, which is part of why so many still exist scattered across different collections.
The 1834 version now at the National Gallery of Art belongs to the middle of that long run, painted seven years after the Hicksite Orthodox split. Museums holding other versions, the Metropolitan Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum among them, read the paintings the same way: the series tracks Hicks working through a real rupture rather than illustrating a fixed idea once and repeating it unchanged.
What shifts from canvas to canvas is instructive. The animals rearrange themselves. Some versions include the William Penn treaty vignette in the background; others leave it out. Later versions, painted closer to his death, are often read as more resigned, less certain the peace they depict was coming.
Taken together the sixty two canvases function less like a single finished statement and more like a running argument Hicks kept having with himself, in paint, using the same few words from Isaiah every time and never quite finishing the sentence.