Edward Hicks and the Falls of the Niagara

This great o’erwhelming work of awful Time
In all its dread magnificence sublime.
—Alexander Wilson, “The Foresters”

He was never a placid man, but because the painting spreads a veil of calm upon the turbulence of the scene, one might think that Edward saw the falls with a sanguine if not restful eye. He stood on the edge of the chasm across the falls a single time, months prior to his attempt to realize it. He had been on a journey through the western wilds of Pennsylvania and New York, a preaching mission that took him to the edge of the Great Lakes and back, and his image of the falls resurfaced unbidden in his mind long after he had returned to his home and business. He had known, even as he stood on the edge, from the awe he felt in his spine and chest that he had been shown a sign, though it was as yet illegible.

His memory was branded by the torrent’s scale, its utter power. He could still feel its sound and the shivers it sent through the earth, could still watch the great mists rising from the reconstituted river at the base. Yet what he remembered most was the composition of the falls: the two halves split by a rocky promontory, descending in chaos and tumult into the river below.

At home in Pennsylvania, the artist was often troubled by what he saw as a lie in the faith of others. He antagonized those who called themselves “Orthodox,” as if their beliefs were a return to doctrine, not a departure from it: not an assault upon the guidance of the Inward Light. He let his criticisms be known in meetinghouse sermons, and in return, he was shunned, talked about, called a primitive. He knew he was an irksome critic, and his business suffered; his health was afflicted. Edward strove to find the forbearance to forgive. Agonized by the crisis of disunion rising in the Friends, he feared for the future of the Society, as he saw town and countryside divided by schism and descending into bitterness.

Never a simple man, the artist was struggling in the grip of a second crisis of mind. His fears for the Quakers compounded his second fear, which was about art itself: about how it could be a lie, even when the likeness was true; a betrayal of created things in their simplicity; an affront to plainness. As he decorated carriages and traps with filigree and lacquer, he felt himself cloaked in vanity. Edward viewed his trade with the guilt of a secret sin. Even the signs he painted for local merchants—a boot for the cobbler, a burning wick for the chandler—seemed to him blood spots, marks of a crime. That all of creation should cleave so readily between object and image tempted Edward to impious thoughts of an unraveling, a flaw deep in the fabric of things, a flaw that he deepened bit by bit with every brushstroke he made.

If he was to have a place to speak of the falsity of others, he must recognize his own. If he was to condemn the acts of his fellow Friends, then he would be forced to renounce his own.

Still, he was compelled to paint: compelled by avocation, by his very presence in the world, perhaps most of all, by memory, and in the worst year of the schism, Niagara kept falling in his memory. He could not justify his artifice, could not explain his need to project his mind’s eye. He could only obey it and perhaps find some reason for his vain entertainment, if it could also be the vehicle for some honest message.

And so he found himself—or rather watched himself—in the fall of the year, as he set up an easel in the pantry of his house away from the children. Darkness fell earlier each day, the light weakening in the small window, while his self-regard faded, and he was gradually lost, filling a small rectangle of spare wooden board with his picture. As winter closed in and the room grew dark, he stopped, sheepish, and tried to forget what he’d made until the spring.

Come and see. Under an arch of summer trees, across the hazy space of the chasm, the river is split by a promontory into a pair of torrents traversed with rainbow clouds of spray, the falling water roaring over the escarpment into the basin, two parts descending into chaos, then reunited and moving toward the sea: altered, perhaps humbled, but without question one river again.