Grandma Moses
(Anna Mary Robertson Moses)
(1860-1961)
BIOGRAPHY
American self-taught artist, known for her scenes of rural life in New York state. Born Anna Mary Robertson to a farming family in Washington County, New York, she spent much of her life on farms. She worked on a neighboring farm before her marriage in 1887 to Thomas Salmon Moses. The couple farmed in Virginia until their return to New York in 1905. By then, Moses had borne ten children, five of whom died in infancy. Back in New York, the couple bought a farm in Rensselaer County in the Hoosick River valley, where Moses lived until her death. Her husband died in 1927, and Moses began painting for her own enjoyment in the mid-1930s when she was in her 70s. She took up painting because arthritis made it difficult for to hold the needles for the embroidery and needlework she was accustomed to doing.
A 1938 exhibit of her paintings in a Hoosick Falls drugstore brought her to the attention of an art collector who offered encouragement and showed her paintings to a New York art dealer. In 1939 three of her landscapes were displayed in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The following year the Galerie St. Étienne in New York City presented her first solo show. These exhibitions launched her career as an artist. She soon won national recognition, and her paintings were widely reproduced in magazines and on greeting cards. The paintings that brought her fame as Grandma Moses feature the changing seasons and the various activities of farm life—sleigh rides, quilting bees, making soap or apple butter, barn dances, and county fairs. As she noted, she liked “old-timey things.” Set against a blue sky, the paintings typically feature tree-covered green hills; patterned fields; and tiny human figures, farm animals, buggies, and farm buildings. Most of them are in oil on masonite board. Her work is characterized by harmonious arrangement of figures and simple, decorative treatment, as in Thanksgiving Turkey (1943, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City). Her autobiography, My Life’s History, was published in 1952.