Grandma Moses
Grandma Moses (September 7, 1860 – December 13, 1961) was a renowned American folk artist.
Early Life
She was born Anna Mary Robertson in Greenwich, New York. She was one of ten children born to Russell and Margaret Robertson. Grandma Moses had little formal education she attended a small one-room schoolhouse with her siblings. As a child, she used fruit juice to paint on pieces of wood or materials her father brought home for her. He brought the other children candy, but she preferred drawing supplies because "it lasted longer than candy."
She left home at the age of twelve to begin working as housekeeper. She keep that same occupation for fifteen years when she met and married Thomas Salmon Moses in 1887. They met while working together on the same farm. The couple relocated in 1887 to Staunton, Virginia to manage a horse ranch. They had ten children but five did not live past infancy.
Thomas Moses missed New York and persuaded his wife to return in 1905.
Painting
She began painting in her seventies after abandoning a career in embroidery because of arthritis.
Her artwork was discovered by Louis J. Caldor, a collector who noticed her paintings in a Hoosick Falls drugstore window in 1938. In 1939 an art dealer named Otto Kallir exhibited some of her work at his Galerie Saint-Etienne in New York. This brought her to the attention of art collectors all over the world, and her paintings were highly sought after. She went on to have exhibitions of her work throughout Europe and even in Japan, where her work was particularly well received. She continued her prolific output of paintings, the demand for which never diminished during her lifetime.
In 1946, her painting "The Old Checkered Inn in Summer" was featured in the background of a national advertising campaign for the young women's lip gloss "PRIMITIVE RED" by Du Barry cosmetics.
Later in Life
President Harry S. Truman presented her with the Women's National Press Club Award for outstanding accomplishment in art in 1949. In 1951, she appeared on See It Now, a television program hosted by Edward R. Murrow.
Grandma Moses painted mostly scenes of rural life. Some of her many paintings were used on the covers of Hallmark cards.
"Grandma" Moses celebrated her 100th birthday on the 7th of September, 1960. Life magazine commissioned Cornell Capa to make a portrait of Moses for the occasion, which it printed as a cover article. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller also proclaimed the day "Grandma Moses Day" in her honor.
She died at Hoosick Falls on December 13, 1961 and is buried at the Maple Grove Cemetery. Her gravestone is inscribed with this epitaph: "Her primitive paintings captured the spirit and preserved the scene of a vanishing countryside." She had outlived most of her children.
For a sense of the current value of her paintings, a September 2nd 1942 piece entitled "The Old Checkered House, 1862" was appraised at the Memphis 2004 Antiques Roadshow. The painting was unique in that it showed a summer scene, as she was well known for her winter landscapes. Originally purchased in the 40s for $110, appraiser Alan Fausel assigned the piece an insurance value of $60,000.
External links
- Grandma Moses Gallery at the Bennington Museum
- Examples of her paintings, from the Cal Poly Pomona website
- Page about Grandma Moses at Galerie St. Etienne in New York.
Credits
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