A farm wife who turned to painting at the age of seventy-six, Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses rose to national prominence during the 1940s, garnering popular acclaim for her portrayals of daily life in upstate New York and Virginia. Notable for their bright colors, stylized forms, and rich array of anecdotal detail, her engaging depictions of “old timey things” have become ingrained in the American psyche as uplifting emblems of the country’s rural past. A self-taught artist, Moses is considered a seminal figure in the tradition of American folk art. She has also been linked with post-war Modernism, sharing aesthetic strategies explored by several of her contemporaries who also worked in a primitivist manner, among them Elie Nadelman and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
Born on a farm near the village of Greenwich, New York, to parents of Scotch-Irish descent, Moses had little formal education, having left home at age twelve to work as a domestic in local households. Following her marriage to Thomas Salmon Moses in 1887, she spent almost two decades living on a farm in Staunton, Virginia, during which time she bore ten children, five of whom survived into adulthood. In 1905, Moses and her family moved to a dairy farm in Eagle Bridge in Rensselaer County, New York (not far from Moses’s birthplace), where she busied herself with farm work, cooking, sewing, and raising her offspring.
Moses had a strong artistic sensibility, instilled by her father, an amateur painter and inventor who encouraged her early interest in art. As a young woman she depicted farm scenes on needlepoint pictures and quilts, a hobby that would later inform her handling of color, form, and texture. She also used house paint to embellish ordinary household objects, such as fireboards. Following her husband’s death in 1927, Moses began painting landscapes on a “tip-up” table in her bedroom studio, soaking her brushes in empty cold cream jars and using discarded jar covers as palettes. When worsening arthritis forced her to give up her notions and fancy work, Moses began painting on a steady basis, developing an approach characterized by simplified shapes and luminous hues. She also used unconventional techniques, sometimes adding glitter to white paint to denote the effects of sunlight on snow and sizing her paintings according to the old frames she had around the house. Moses also clipped motifs from greeting cards, old newspaper clippings, and Currier and Ives prints, creating an archive of visual motifs that she used to produce contour drawings on her support. Her earliest paintings were squarish, modestly scaled, and limited to only a few elements, as in The First Automobile (1939 or earlier; private collection). However, by about 1944 Moses was working on larger formats, focusing her attention on expansive settings featuring groups of people, buildings, houses, and animals carefully dispersed across the surface of her support as if caught in a moment in time, as demonstrated in classic examples such as Out for Christmas Trees (1946; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.).
Moses initially gave her paintings as gifts to friends and relatives, but as her confidence as an artist grew, she began exhibiting and selling her work at local fairs and charity events, alongside her homemade jams and preserves. She was “discovered” in 1938 when Louis J. Caldor, a civil engineer and art aficionado from New York, saw some of her paintings in a window of Thomas’ Drug Store in Hoosick Falls, New York, and acquired about a dozen examples for his collection. In addition to supplying Moses with oil paints and canvas boards, Caldor became her advocate in the New York art world, introducing her work to leading gallerists such as Sidney Janis, who included three of her paintings in his exhibition, Contemporary Unknown American Painters, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1939. Caldor also showed her paintings to Otto Kallir, who, attracted to the way in which she utilized her naive style to create “a compelling truth and closeness to nature,” gave Moses a solo show at the Galerie St. Etienne in 1940 and went on to become her dealer and biographer. An exhibition of Moses’s paintings at Gimbel’s Department Store during that same year was instrumental in propelling her into the national spotlight. In the ensuing years, Moses’s work was acquired by such progressive-minded collectors as Duncan Phillips, who purchased McDonnell Farm (1943) and Hoosick Farm in Winter (1944) for The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The industrialist Thomas J. Watson, chairman and CEO of IBM Corporation, was also an early supporter of Moses’s work.
Nicknamed “Grandma Moses” by a writer for the New York Herald Tribune, Moses’s talent, work ethic, and cheerful outlook on life also made her the darling of the mass media, attracting attention both at home and abroad for her paintings, her plucky, down-to-earth personality, and her advanced age. Moses’s paintings were included in solo and group shows in museums throughout the United States and Europe and disseminated on a wider basis through reproductions on calendars, Christmas cards, and china, as well as in magazines such as Saturday Evening Post and Life. Her autobiography, My Life’s History (1952), contributed to her status as an American icon.
By the time Grandma Moses died on December 13, 1961 at age 101, she had completed over 1,600 paintings featuring scenes of country life inspired by her recollections of the past and her belief that “Memory is recorded in our brain."