This article is about the folk artist; 'Grandma Moses' was also a nickname given to abolitionist and slave rescuer Harriet Tubman.
Cornell Capa's portrait of Grandma Moses on her 100th Birthday
Cornell Capa's portrait of Grandma Moses on her 100th Birthday
Anna Mary Moses - better known as Grandma Moses -- (September 7, 1860 – December 13, 1961) was a renowned American folk artist. She is often cited as an example of an individual successfully beginning a career in the arts at an advanced age.
She was born Anna Mary Robertson in Greenwich, New York. 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 to purchase drawing supplies because they "lasted longer than candy".
She spent most of her life as a farmer's wife and the mother of 5 children. She married Thomas Solomon Moses in 1887. They lived in the Shenandoah Valley before settling in Eagle Bridge, New York.
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.
Grandma Moses (1953)
Grandma Moses (1953)
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. In 1952, she published her autobiography entitled Grandma Moses: My Life's History.
Grandma Moses painted mostly scenes of rural life. Some of her many paintings were used on the covers of Hallmark cards.
She 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.
