Thomas Hicks was apprenticed at an early age to his cousin Edward Hicks, the primitive artist and Quaker preacher, to learn Edward's trade of carriage painting. He grasped the fundamentals of painting quickly, and his initial attempts at portraiture were deemed so successful that he was encouraged to leave Bucks County for Philadelphia to pursue studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Apparently he worked there only one summer, moving directly on to New York and entering the National Academy's antique class in the autumn of 1838. Within the year he exhibited for the first time in an Academy annual, showing three portraits. In the autumn of 1839 he advanced to the Academy's life class. He re-enrolled in that class for 1841-42 and 1844-45.
In 1845 Hicks went to Europe. In 1848, after visiting London and Florence and making an extended stay in Rome, he settled in Paris, where he entered in the atelier of Thomas Couture. He studied under Couture for about a year and a half, returning to the United States in the fall of 1849. Although he settled in Trenton Falls, he maintained a studio in New York. (From 1856 the latter studio was in a building on Astor Place that was known for the foot-high lettering of Hicks's name displayed on its facade.)
Although his genre, literary, and historical subject paintings drew praise, it was as a portraitist that Hicks gained fame and some little fortune. By all reports, he had not only talent and training but also that other gift essential to the success of a fashionable portrait painter: personal charm. His sitters, among the most noted personalities of his time, included Edwin Booth (in various theatrical roles), William Cullen Bryant, Margaret Fuller, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Bayard Taylor. One of his most celebrated works was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, done from sittings in Springfield, Illinois, in June 1860, immediately after his nomination for president-said to be the first likeness of Lincoln in oils.
Within a decade after his return from abroad, Hicks's prompt and steady success as a portraitist allowed him to build a home, Thornwood, in Trenton Falls, which at the time was a popular tourist attraction and summer resort. However, he remained actively involved in the New York art community for the rest of his life. Hicks was an active contributor to Academy annual exhibitions. Between 1839 and 1890, he missed only those of 1846, 1848, and 1849 (years when he was abroad), 1860, 1872, and 1876. Until the late 1860s he showed a variety of subjects, but thereafter he was represented almost exclusively by portraits. Hicks's first service on the Academy's Council was in 1854-55, as an appointed replacement for Henry Peters Gray, who was on extended absence from the city. He was elected to the Council for the 1858-59 season, for the years 1862 to 1866, and again from 1872 to 1876. Although the frequency with which he was elected to the Council testifies to faithful service to the Academy, Hicks seems to have directed more of his attention to the Artists' Fund Society, of which he was president from 1873 to 1885.
By the time of his death, Hicks's manner in portraiture was about twenty years out of date, which may account for the tepid tone of the eulogy read into the minutes of the Council meeting on October 13, 1890:
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Mr. Hicks began his art life at an early age and with goodly promise, which was fully realized in a long and prosperous professional career, during which he painted admirable portraits of many of the prominent authors, statesmen, and other eminent citizens, and numerous ideal and genre pictures, well known and highly treasured by their possessors.
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JPH
