He was the second of the four sons of Andrew Picken the novelist, and brother of Thomas Ashburton Picken the lithographer. He became a pupil of Louis Haghe, and in 1835 received from the Society of Arts their silver Isis medal for a lithographic drawing of the ruins of the Houses of Parliament after the fire of 1834. In the same year he exhibited, at the Royal Academy, a view of a tomb in Narbonne Cathedral.