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 Grandma (Anna Robertson) Moses  (1860 - 1961)

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Lived/Active: New York/Virginia      Known for: naive landscape and rural genre naive painting
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
The following text is from a review in the Washington Post, April 5, 2001, by Jo Ana Lewis:

Americana Beauty: Newfangled Feminist Perspectives Aside, Grandma Moses Deserves a Second Look

Grandma Moses in the 21st Century," a retrospective at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, exhibits 87 paintings including "The Lake," from 1957.

(Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York via Reuters)

In 1961, when the American farm wife known as Grandma Moses died, she was 101 and world-famous.  Born a year before the Civil War, she was in her seventies when she taught herself to paint.  And in her eighties when she became a superstar.

Today, Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961) is known chiefly through reproductions of her oil paintings, especially her winter scenes -- quintessential American pictures -- which still appear on dinnerware (based on her painting Home for Thanksgiving) and millions of Christmas cards.

In the hope of deepening what they see as the shallow perception of her work, Moses' long-time New York dealership and several scholars have taken up the cause in "Grandma Moses in the 21st Century," a retrospective at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.  In it are 87 paintings, tracing her rise from oblivion in Eagle Bridge, N.Y., to fame as the best-known woman painter of her time.

She painted "old-timey things," as she put it -- recollections of a happy life as a child, then wife, on a farm in Upstate New York and, for a time, in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.  With a special gift for conjuring atmospheric landscapes and changing seasons, she filled her paintings with communal scenes of families and farmhands, grown-ups and children all happily working together on the endless cycle of farm tasks: making maple syrup or catching the Thanksgiving turkey.

Her birthdays were celebrated on the covers of Time and Life magazines.  When Edward R. Murrow interviewed her on "See It Now," she shoved a piece of paper in front of him and told him to paint a tree: "Anybody can paint," she said.  Her plain speaking endeared her to a world mostly baffled by abstraction.

"If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens," she told Murrow. "I would never sit back in a rocking chair, waiting for someone to help."  That interview, which runs in the museum's orientation gallery, tells you all you need to know about why the public loved her. Moses' art is most rewarding when seen through the prism of her remarkable life, which began as one of 10 children of a farmer who painted landscapes in his spare time.  She learned the womanly arts of cooking, cleaning, sewing, soapmaking, candlemaking and so forth by age 12, and was sent to work as a hired girl to nearby relatives.  At 27 she married a hired man, Thomas Salmon Moses, and moved to the Shenandoah Valley, near Staunton, where they worked
as tenant farmers. There she bore 10 children; only five survived infancy.

Two decades later the Moses family returned to Upstate New York and bought a dairy farm just a few miles from where she'd grown up on the Vermont border.

She never painted until after the death of her husband in 1927, when arthritis forced her to abandon the "worsted pictures" she'd been embroidering.  Soon she was offering her oil paintings on pressed wood for sale at county fairs, along with her prize-winning pickles.  Her big break came in 1938 when a traveling collector from New York saw them in the window of a pharmacy in Hoosick Falls, N.Y., and bought the lot.

He took the paintings to Otto Kallir, a refugee Viennese art dealer who'd opened the Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan.  It was Kallir who launched her career in 1940 with a show titled "What a Farm Woman Painted."  Five years later, her fame skyrocketed when Hallmark purchased the right to reproduce her paintings on Christmas cards, selling 6 million copies the first year.  That same year, the first book on "Grandma Moses" made the New York Times bestseller list.

"Until her death in 1961, she was a very big deal," says Kallir's granddaughter, art historian Jane Kallir, this show's guest curator and author of one of the catalogue essays.  Today, however, Kallir believes that Moses has been unjustly overlooked by the art world, museums in particular.  And this she attributes, in part, to the negative aspects of over-commercialization, which Kallir believes diminished her stature as an artist.  She believes Moses is ripe for reassessment and revival.

I rolled my eyes when I first read about this show, and its "rethinking and revival" of Grandma Moses.  This is folk art, I thought. What's to rethink?  And how could she be less relevant to our times?  As for the five scholarly essays in the inch-thick catalogue -- especially one subtitled "A Feminist Reading" -- it seemed like scholarly overkill.  How can you call this artist overlooked when no self-taught painter over 50 can pick up a brush without being labeled "a Grandma Moses"?

But I looked at the paintings and realized how rarely, apart from reproductions, this work is seen today, and what happy encounters the real ones could provide.  Grandma Moses' paintings are time capsules, colorful narrative landscapes brimming with anecdotal vignettes about the joys of a way of life now lost.  True: Moses counts only the happy hours.  But as she once said, "What's the use of painting a picture if it isn't something nice?"  Her paintings are cumulative, without linear perspective, and need to be "read" as the eye wanders over the landscape adding up details.

One wonderful painting called The Thunderstorm, 1948, for instance, is almost cinematic in the way it moves from one vignette to another.  As dark clouds gather, the wind whips the trees and takes away the hat of the farmer rushing a horse-drawn hay wagon into the barn, trying to beat the rain.  In a distant field, a black horse bolts in fear, apparently at the sound of thunder.  Two men lean on their rakes, watching the darkening sky.  A child's long hair blows in the wind. Who could fail to enjoy such a picture?

There are also paintings of sleigh rides, picnics and quilting bees, all laden with nostalgia for an idealized American way of life that, to this day, is still defined by such pictures.  The same can be said of the highly trained illustrator Norman Rockwell, who has recently been rethought and revived.  Perhaps that's what inspired Kallir's hopes for Grandma Moses.

But Kallir may want too much from this show. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, another essayist and chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, set more realistic parameters:  "These are small pictures with tiny people in them, and we're a big-screen, billboard culture," Hartigan says.  "But Grandma Moses was a visual storyteller, and human beings like to read stories in pictures.  We have narrative minds.  So why fight it?  People should just enjoy these paintings for the storytelling pictures they are."

This biography from the Archives of AskART:
Exhibitions:

    1998 - 1999        Self-Taught Artists (U.S. Traveling Exhibition), Philadelphia Museum of Art and other venues Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

    1996        Grandma Moses: Pictures from the Past, Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Florida

    1995        Grandma Moses, Osaka, Tokyo, Yamaguchi, Chiba, Japan

    1990        Grandma Moses, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Funabashi, Yokohama, Japan

    1989        Masters of Naive Art (Japanese Traveling Exhibition), Daimaru Museum and other venues Kyoto, Japan

    1987        Grandma Moses, Isetan Museum and other venues Tokyo, Japan

    1984        The World of Grandma Moses, New York, NY; Baltimore, MD; Nashville, TN; Omaha, NB; Peoria, IL

    1982 - 1983        Grandma Moses: The Artist Behind the Myth, Galerie St. Etienne and other venues New York, NY

    1981 - 1982        The Folk Art Tradition, Galerie St. Etienne New York, NY

    1979        Grandma Moses, National Gallery of Art Washington, DC

    1974 - 1975        Die Kunst der Naïven, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunsthaus, Zurich Germany; Switzerland

    1968 - 1972        The Grandma Moses Gallery, Bennington Museum Bennington, VT

    1969        Art and Life of Grandma Moses, Gallery of Modern Art New York, NY

    1966        1st Triennial of Insitic Art, Nárpolná Galéria Slovenska, Bratislava

    1963 - 1964        A Life's History in 40 Pictures, Austria, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Russia

    1964        Der Lusthof der Naïven, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen Rotterdam, Holland

    1964        Der Lusthof der Naïven, Musée National d'Art Moderne Paris, France

    1962        Grandma Moses: Memorial Exhibition, Galerie St. Etienne New York, NY

    1960        My Life's History, IBM Gallery and other venues New York, NY

    1955 - 1957        European Traveling Exhibition, various venues

    1944 - 1956        U.S. Traveling Exhibitions, various venues

    1954 - 1955        American Primitive Paintings, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Norway, UK, Germany

    1955        A Tribute to Grandma Moses, IBM Gallery New York, NY

    1950        European Traveling Exhibition, various venues

    1949        Paintings by Grandma Moses, Phillips Collection Washington, DC

    1944        New Paintings by Grandma Moses, Galerie St. Etienne New York, NY

    1940        What a Farm Wife Painted, Galerie St. Etienne New York, NY

    1939        Contemporary Unknown Painters, Museum of Modern Art New York, NY


Additional exhibition venues are the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas; Art Institute of Chicago; Canjohaire Library and Art Gallery; National Museum of Women in the Arts;
Phillips Collection; Portland Art Museum; National Gallery, Tyler Museum of Art and the University of Rochester Gallery.


Source:
Präsentierte Kunstwerke, Ausstellungen und Biografie vonWally Findlay Galleri


This biography from the Archives of AskART:
Anna Mary Robertson Moses was born in 1860 in Greenwich, New York.  Most of her life was spent in eastern New York State where she was the child of a Scottish-Irish farm family and led what she later described as a very happy childhood.  Her father encouraged her to draw and paint on unused newsprint, which he brought home to keep the children busy, and she used berry juice to brighten her pictures.  She never went beyond the "sixth reader" in school.

At age twelve, she became a hired girl, learning household arts.  She married Thomas Salmon Moses, who was a hired man; she was a conventional farm wife, living with him on a large farm near Staunton, Virginia and bearing ten children, but only five survived.  She loved the scenery of the Shenandoah Valley, but never had time to paint it while she lived there.  She and her husband returned to New York State to a dairy farm in the small village of Eagle Bridge, where she spent the remainder of her life.  Occasionally she did paintings for holiday gifts, but never took it seriously.  However, her husband gave her work much praise, and after his death, when she was in her seventies, she was too weak for hard labor, so she filled her time with stitchery landscape pictures.

Although she had never painted seriously until she was seventy-seven, and had no formal training whatsoever, the pictures of this farm woman, whose life since childhood has been one of hard toil, have captured the critics, enchanted the public and made her, from her own standards at least, a rich woman.  When her doctor ordered her to rest because of her neuritis and arthritis, she started painting "to keep busy and out of mischief."  She painted in the early part of the day and worked on several paintings at one time, all from imagination and memory.

At her best, Grandma Moses was no ordinary primitive.  She had in her mind a shadowless world of dancing images and these she painted on Masonite with a freshness of vision that seemed eternally young.  She became in her lifetime a national institution, a witty doughty lady who seemed to recall something about America that America missed.  She painted from memory, but never of sickness, poverty or death.  Her paintings numbered more than 1500; they were shown in more than 150 exhibitions in the United States and in five one-man shows abroad.

She made the covers of Life and Time magazines.  She was interviewed on radio and television. Her works were reproduced on collector's plates, fabrics and millions of greeting cards.

She had eleven grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.  She felt she had more time for the great grandchildren than she had had with her children and even her grandchildren.


Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.

Sources include:
Time Magazine, September 6, 1948
Time Magazine, December 22, 1961 and December 28, 1953
Dorothy Thompson in the Ladies' Home Journal (date unknown)
From the internet, AskART.com
"Modern Eyes on a Quaint Reputation" by Scarlet Cheng, Los Angeles Times, July 8, 2001

This biography from the Archives of AskART:
Born in Greenwich, New York, Grandma Moses is the pivotal figure of the 20th-century American folk art movement, known for her decorative, naive landscape and genre paintings of rural New England.  She had a precise way of organizing color and pattern.

Her early life was spent in eastern New York State where she was the child of a Scottish-Irish farm family and led what she later described as a very happy childhood.  Her father encouraged her to draw and paint on unused newsprint, which he brought home to keep the children busy, and she used berry juice to brighten her pictures.

At age twelve, she became a hired girl, learning household arts.  She married Thomas Salmon Moses and was a conventional farm wife, living with him on a large farm near Staunton, Virginia and bearing ten children, but only five survived.  She loved the scenery of the Shenandoah Valley, but never had time to paint it while she lived there.

She and her husband returned to New York State to a dairy farm in a small village of Eagle Bridge, where she spent the remainder of her life.  Occasionally she did paintings for holiday gifts, but never took it seriously.  However, her husband gave her work much praise, and after his death, when she was in her 70s, she was too weak for hard labor, so she filled her time with stitchery landscape pictures.

Her children thought her work was so appealing they encouraged her to transfer her talent with color and design to painting; her first was on canvas from a threshing machine cover.  Her daughter-in-law took her pictures to the women's exchange in the local drugstore in Hoosick Falls, and Louis Caldor, a private collector from out of town, was highly impressed.  He bought the first group and visiting Moses, purchased more.

He tried to sell them to museums and galleries, but had little response. The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. was the first museum to acquire her work, which gradually began to attract much attention.  The U.S. Office of Information began to promote her painting as representative of America, and in 1939, she was featured in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.  By the 1940s, she was a household word, a celebrity who was entertained in the White House.  She had a television interview with Edward R. Murrow when she was over ninety and lived to be 101 years.

As a thrifty housewife, she was appalled at the high prices her paintings brought and had to have a special manager of her affairs.  But Americans love her work for the nostalgia of happy times in the past they suggest, and they are willing to pay large sums for the images she creates.

The Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont is the primary public repository of her paintings and has two galleries of ongoing exhibitions of her work.

Source:
Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists


This biography from the Archives of AskART:
Selected Solo Exhibitions from the website of Galerie St. Etienne

1940    "What a Farm Wife Painted", Galerie St. Etienne, NY

1944    "New Paintings by Grandma Moses", Galerie St. Etienne, NY

1944-56    Traveling exhibitions: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Washington DC, Montana, Virginia, California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Chicago, North Carolina, Kansas, Maryland, Connecticut, Alabama, Tennessee, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Vermont, Delaware, Louisiana, Indiana, Florida, Washington State, NY State, South Carolina

1949    "Paintings by Grandma Moses", Phillips Collection, Washington

1950    "Grandma Moses: 50 Paintings"; European traveling exhibition: Vienna, Munich, Salzburg, Bern, the Hague, Paris

1955    "A Tribute to Grandma Moses", IBM Gallery, NY

1955-57    European traveling exhibition: Bremen, Stuttgart, Cologne, Hamburg, London, Oslo, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow

1960    "My Life's History", IBM Gallery, NY; Milwaukee, Washington DC, Chattanooga, Baton Rouge, Seattle, Laguna Beach, Fort Worth, Winnipeg

1962    "Grandma Moses: Memorial Exhibition", Galerie St. Etienne, NY

1963-64    "A Life's History in 40 Pictures"; European traveling exhibition: Vienna, Paris, Bremen, Hamburg, Hameln, Fulda, Düsseldorf, Darmstadt, Mannheim, Berlin, Frankfurt, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Göteborg, Copenhagen, Moscow

1968-present    
The Grandma Moses Gallery (permanent installation), Bennington Museum, Vermont

Biography from Galerie St. Etienne:
Anna Mary Robertson was born on September 7, 1860, in Greenwich, a small community in upstate New York about thirty miles northwest of Bennington, Vermont.  Her father, Russell King Robertson, was a farmer and also operated a flax mill.  While Anna Mary's five brothers helped their father at the mill and on the farm, she and her four sisters were taught to master a variety of domestic duties.  At the tender age of twelve, Anna Mary went to work as a "hired girl" on a neighboring farm, helping a wealthier family with the household chores.  She was to pursue this sort of work for the next fifteen years until, at the age of 27, she met a "hired man," Thomas Salmon Moses, whom she married.

The year was 1887, and Thomas had been told that the Reconstruction-era South was a land of opportunity for Yankees such as himself.  Within hours of their wedding, the couple was on a train headed for North Carolina, where Thomas had secured a job managing a horse ranch.  However, he and his bride never made it beyond Staunton, Virginia.  Here they stopped for the night and were persuaded to take over as tenants on a local farm.  Anna Mary immediately fell in love with the beautiful Shenandoah Valley--her chilly New York State home (albeit mountainous) would forever after seem a "swamp" by comparison.  Life was not always easy, though.  Anna Mary, who believed in pulling her weight, bought a cow with her own savings and supplemented the family income by churning butter.  Later, when times were tough, she made and sold potato chips.  She gave birth to ten children, of whom only five survived infancy.

Still, the family prospered, eventually earning enough to buy their own farm.  Anna Mary Moses, known by then as "Mother Moses" to many of her neighbors, would happily have spent the rest of her life in Virginia, but Thomas was homesick.  In 1905, he persuaded his wife to return North.  "I don't think a bit has changed since we left," Anna Mary commented, "the gates are hanging on one hinge since I went away."  She and Thomas bought a farm in Eagle Bridge, not far from her birthplace. They named it "Mount Nebo"--prophetically, after the Biblical mountain where Moses disappeared.  It was on this farm, in 1927, that Thomas Moses died of a heart attack.

Anna Moses was not one to sit idle. Though all her children were now grown, there was still plenty of work to be done on the farm.  Later she would joke, "If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens."  Or, upon further reflection, "I would rent a room in the city some place and give pancake suppers."  In 1932, Moses went to Bennington to take care of her daughter Anna, who was suffering from tuberculosis.  It was Anna who showed her mother a picture, embroidered in yarn, and challenged her to duplicate it.  So Anna Mary Robertson Moses began stitching what she called "worsted" pictures and giving them away to anyone who'd have them.  When Moses complained that arthritis made it hard for her to hold a needle, her sister Celestia suggested she paint instead.  In this casual manner, the career of Grandma Moses began.

Soon Moses had more paintings than she could realistically make use of.  She sent some to the Cambridge country fair, along with her canned fruits and jams.  "I won a prize for my fruit and jam," she sardonically noted, "but no pictures."  Here Moses' painting career might have foundered.  For much as she loved art, Anna Mary Robertson Moses was above all a sensible woman, and to pursue art for art's sake alone would, by and by, have come to seem a petty indulgence.  But then, in 1936 or '37, Caroline Thomas, the wife of the druggist in the neighboring village of Hoosick Falls, invited Moses to contribute to a women's exchange she was organizing.  Moses' paintings sat in the drugstore window, gathering dust next to crafts and other objects created by local homemakers, for several years. 

Then, during Easter week of 1938, a New York City collector named Louis Caldor chanced through town.  Caldor traveled regularly in connection with his job as an engineer for the New York City water department, and he was in the habit of seeking out native artistic "finds."  The paintings in the drugstore window caught his eye; he asked to see more and ended up buying the whole lot.  He also got the artist's name and address and set off to meet her in person.  Moses' family clearly thought Caldor was crazy when he told their Grandma he'd make her famous.  And indeed, for the next few years, it seemed the family was right.  Caldor brought his trove of Moses paintings to New York City and began doggedly making the rounds of museums and galleries.  Even those who admired the work lost interest when they heard the artist's age.  Turning 88 in 1938, Moses hardly seemed worth the effort and expense involved in mounting an exhibition; her life expectancy was such that most dealers felt they would never reap a profit on their initial investment.  Still, Caldor persisted, and in 1939 he had his first limited success: The collector Sidney Janis selected three Moses paintings for inclusion in a private viewing at the Museum of Modern Art. However, this exhibition, which was open only to Museum members, had no immediate impact.

Finally, in 1940, Caldor stopped at the Galerie St. Etienne.  Recently founded by Otto Kallir, a Viennese emigré, the Galerie St. Etienne specialized in modern Austrian masters such as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.  But Kallir, like many of the pioneers who championed modernism in the pivotal decades between the two world wars, was also interested in the work of self-taught painters. In Europe, this trend had been established when Picasso "adopted" the painting toll collector Henri Rousseau, and was furthered by the published writings of the Russian-born Expressionist Vasily Kandinsky.  Essentially, these artists and their various followers believed that the work of self-taught artists was purer and more original than that of trained painters.  In tandem with a concerted effort to renounce academic tradition, the contemporary avant-garde looked to the example of those who, for whatever reason, had been denied formal training. 

Anna Mary Robertson Moses made her public debut at the Galerie St. Etienne in October 1940.  Otto Kallir had titled the exhibition "What a Farmwife Painted," thinking that the artist's name, completely unknown, did not merit attention.  It was only some months later that a journalist, interviewing friends in Eagle Bridge, came upon and then popularized the local nickname "Grandma Moses."  The St. Etienne exhibition, though well publicized and well attended, was only a modest success. What really got Moses' career rolling was a Thanksgiving Festival organized by Gimbels Department Store shortly after the St. Etienne show closed.  A substantial group of paintings was reassembled at Gimbels, and the artist was invited to come to New York.  In her little black hat and lace-collared dress, accompanied by the proprietary Caroline Thomas, Moses (perhaps remembering her experiences at the country fair) delivered a forthright public address on her jams and preserved fruits. The hardboiled New York press corps was delighted, and the legend of Grandma Moses was born.  In defiance of every precedent, Grandma Moses became a superstar.  She did not do so willfully or suddenly, but she did so nonetheless.  Her talk at Gimbels in 1940 brought a burst of publicity, and Moses was soon something of a local celebrity, but her renown was confined to New York State.

She exhibited at a number of upstate venues and began to be besieged by vacationers seeking artistic souvenirs.  For some years, Moses resisted signing a formal contract with Kallir, believing she could manage matters herself.  Finally, in 1944, frustrated by the seasonal nature of her tourist-oriented business and by the difficulty collecting payment from some of her customers, she agreed to be represented exclusively by the Galerie St. Etienne and the American British Art Center, whose director, Ala Story, had also become a steady buyer of Moses' work.  The events that established Moses as a national and then international celebrity followed in quick succession.  Kallir and Story immediately launched a series of traveling exhibitions that would, over the ensuing two decades, bring Moses' work to more than thirty American states and ten European nations.

In 1946, Kallir edited the first monograph on the artist, Grandma Moses: American Primitive and oversaw the licensing of the first Moses Christmas cards.  Both projects proved so successful that the following year the book was reprinted and the greeting card license taken over by Hallmark.  In 1949, Moses traveled to Washington to receive a special award from President Truman.  The next year, a documentary film on her life, photographed by Erica Anderson, directed by Jerome Hill, and with narration by Archibald MacLeish, was nominated for an Academy Award.  Her autobiography, My Life's History, was published in 1952.

The dawning age of mass communications gave the public unprecedented access to Grandma Moses and her work.  In addition to traveling exhibitions, books and greeting cards, people could enjoy posters and even mural-sized reproductions, china plates, drapery fabrics and a number of other licensed Moses products.  By live-remote broadcast--then a technological marvel--Moses' voice was beamed out from her home in Eagle Bridge to the larger world.  A rare use of color television was made to show Moses' paintings when she was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow in 1955.  And Lillian Gish portrayed the artist in one of the first televised "docu-dramas."  The rags-to-riches saga of the elderly painter captured the American imagination.  acing the harsh realities of the cold-war era, the public took heart in a real-life tale that seemed to prove the old adage, "it's never too late."

The media seemingly never tired of repeating Moses' fairy-tale story.  In 1953, she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine; in 1960, Life sent noted photographer Cornell Capa to do a cover story on the artist's 100th birthday.  That birthday--declared "Grandma Moses Day" by New York's governor, Nelson Rockefeller--was celebrated almost like a holiday in the nation's press.  The fanfare was repeated the following year, when Moses turned 101.  Everyone rejoiced at the artist's longevity.  Grandma Moses passed away several months after her 101st birthday, on December 13, 1961.  Her death was front page news all over America and throughout much of Europe.

Biography from The Caldwell Gallery - I:
Grandma Moses was a self-taught, American female folk artist who achieved iconic status with her work. She spent 18 years of her life as a farm wife, raising 5 children before beginning her career as an artist. After her husband's death in 1927, Moses began to paint full-time, exhibiting canvases of country scenes with activities and fairs. The paintings were typically bright colored, well-organized compositions depicting a simple and nostalgic way of life. Later, in the 1940s, her work showed more rolling hills with small figures engaged in activity.

Moses' career was publicly launched in 1939 after an exhibit in the local drugstore window, which was brought to the attention of the director of Galerie St. Etienne, NYC. Moses began to show and sell work through the director and made over 1,000 paintings in all. She would work in batches as to complete up to five paintings in a week. She also did work in tile and yarn after her eyesight began to deteriorate.

Grandma Moses died at the age of 101.

** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com.


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William Louis Sonntag

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