It is not the first time that Noah’s Ark has surfaced on the crest of tensions between competing visions of the world and what it means to be alive in it. The 19th-Century American artist and Quaker minister Edward Hicks frequently found himself wrestling with the demands of religious orthodoxy. Libertine in his youth, Hicks eventually committed himself to the principles of conservative Quaker teachings. He strove to embolden his religious dedication through the creation of an ongoing series of paintings he called The Peaceable Kingdom in which mankind and all the creatures of the earth return to an idyllic state of harmony. Among the finest of these works is his 1846 reinvention of a print by the American lithographer Nathaniel Currier, which depicts the entry, two-by-two, of the earth’s animals onto Noah’s Ark. A strangely bestial self-portrait of Hicks, fused bizarrely into the countenance of the lion who stares back at us plaintively, uncertain of the journey ahead, invests the painting with an irresistible intimacy. Placed side-by-side with the recent resuscitation of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky, Hicks’s painting demonstrates the perennial appeal of preposterous transport from a world drowning in reality.

100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age by Kelly Grovier is published by Thames & Hudson.

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