George Elgar Hicks was born in March 1824 to a wealthy English judge and was the second child in the family. George drew well since childhood, but his parents wanted their son to become a doctor. And George Elgar Hicks, under pressure from his parents, entered college at the university, where he studied until 1842. However, his love for painting and desire to draw won out, and George Elgar Hicks entered the Royal Academy of Painting.

After graduating from the academy, the artist got married and quickly acquired a large family – the couple gave birth to six children in the first seven years of marriage. The artist was happy in marriage, but nothing interesting happened in George’s work. He painted genre paintings, which turned out to be passable.

The artist’s first success came only in 1859, when several of the artist’s paintings presented at the exhibition at the Academy received positive reviews from critics and academics.

From the mid-sixties of the nineteenth century, the artist began to paint historical canvases, which did not have much success. And the artist “switched” to painting portraits, which were successful and provided a livelihood.

In 1881, the artist was widowed. He married again in 1884 and retired six years later. George Elgar Hicks died in 1914, a few months before the start of the First World War.