MOSES, GRANDMA

born Sept. 7, 1860, Greenwich, N.Y., U.S. died Dec. 13, 1961, Hoosick Falls, N.Y. byname of Anna Mary Robertson Moses, ne Anna Mary Robertson American folk painter, internationally popular for her nave documentation of rural life in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anna Robertson had only a few months' schooling during the summers of her childhood. At age 12 she left her parents' farm and was a hired girl until she married Thomas Moses in 1887. They first farmed in the Shenandoah Valley near Staunton, Virginia, and in 1905 moved to a farm at Eagle Bridge, New York, near the place where she had been born. Thomas died in 1927, and Anna continued to farm with the help of her youngest son until advancing age forced her to retire to a daughter's home in 1936. As a child Moses had drawn pictures and coloured them with the juice of berries and grapes. After her husband died she created worsted embroidery pictures, and when her arthritis made manipulating a needle too difficult, she turned to painting. At first she copied illustrated postcards and Currier & Ives prints, but gradually she began to re-create scenes from her childhood, as in Catching the Thanksgiving Turkey, Over the River to Grandma's House, Apple Pickers, and Sugaring-Off in the Maple Orchard. Her early paintings were given away or sold for small sums. In 1939 several of her paintings hanging in a drugstore window in Hoosick Falls, New York, impressed Louis Caldor, an engineer and art collector, who then drove to her farm and bought her remaining stock of 15 paintings. In October of that year three of those paintings were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in a show entitled Contemporary, Unknown Painters.From the beginning Grandma Moses's work received favourable criticism. In October 1940 a one-woman show of 35 paintings was held at Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. Thereafter her paintings were shown throughout the United States and Europe in some 150 solo shows and 100 group exhibits.Throughout her lifetime Grandma Moses produced about 2,000 paintings, most of them on masonite board. Her nave style (labeled American Primitive) was acclaimed for its purity of colour, its attention to detail, and its vigour. Her other notable paintings include Out for the Christmas Trees, The Old Oaken Bucket, Black Horses, and From My Window. From 1946 her paintings were often reproduced in prints and on Christmas cards. Her autobiography, My Life's History, was published in 1952. Additional reading Otto Kallir, Grandma Moses (1973, reissued 1985); Jane Kallir, Grandma Moses: The Artist Behind the Myth (1982); and William C. Ketchum, Jr., Grandma Moses: An American Original (1996), discuss her life and art.