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Born: 1860
Died: 1961
Summary of Grandma Moses
For Grandma Moses, success and long life are due to her unwavering appreciation of life’s little pleasures as well as her childlike enthusiasm. Moses only began painting on a daily basis in her mid-70s, and she worked tirelessly until she was 100 years old. The patriarchal stereotype of women and girls confined to the house, restricted, and dependent on their husbands and fathers was a constant source of resentment for Moses since he was a child. As a result, her own paintings omit indoor chores and instead focus on the vast wonders of nature; they look beyond social norms and instead gaze romantically toward the horizon.’ They are full of movement and playfulness, with a constant buzz of activity in the background. It is true that Moses was a pioneer, a visionary, and an advocate for greater equality for all. Her life and work show the far-reaching power of one pair of practical, yet also determined and dedicated, human hands. She is completely self-taught and has a directness of vision. A national holiday has been established in her honour, making Grandma Moses a modern-day saint.
“sugaring off” (making maple syrup), shearing and washing sheep, and making soap and butter are all depicted in Grandma Moses’ paintings. They are portrayed in her photographs as highly creative acts in their own right. In addition, the paintings frequently have a three-dimensional quality that harkens back to the artist’s previous work as an embroiderer. Aside from her famous butter and jam, Moses was known for her many other crafts, including painting.
As a nod to the fact that the first settlers in the American frontier were farmers by necessity, Moses’ work has a distinctively American feel. It also celebrates the wholesome values embodied in a rapidly disappearing traditional way of life. Grandma Moses, unlike Grant Wood and the other American Regionalists, avoids the use of stylization and any ethical viewpoint in her depictions of pastoral America. Instead, she presents a more innocent and authentic view of rural American life.
Moses was a self-taught Outsider Artist, with “folk” and “naïve” tendencies, who worked primarily in isolation and had no formal training. In contrast to the typical dark, anxious, and conflicting aspects of Art Brut, her work does not. Like the British Alfred Wallis, she opted to focus on the positive aspects of everyday life, such as nostalgia, quaintness, and joy. Outsider art may have developed a positive subgenre as a result of outsider artists’ late entry into the field. Inspired mainstream artists who were unable to achieve the same raw and unadulterated state of creativity as the two artists.
Moses’ paintings were turned into greeting cards, tiles, and fabrics and used to sell lipstick, coffee, and cigarettes as an early example of art commercialization. Even though she advocated self-sufficiency and was unsure about the “progress” of industrialization herself, her work was popularised by capitalism, which is ironic given her subject matter. She became a household name and even had a role in a popular television show. With her paintings as common as a fridge magnet or a tea towel, it is a great accomplishment to have been accepted into popular culture so thoroughly.
Childhood
Anna Mary Robertson, better known by her stage name “Grandma Moses” was the third of ten children born to flax farmer Russell King Robertson and his wife Mary Shannahan. Moses, as described by Margot Cleary, “…spent her formative years honing her skills as a farmwife. For the younger children, she helped care for them, while also making her own soap, a candle, and maple syrup syrup.” As a result of all of her duties, Moses had an idyllic childhood. She later recalled it as “…happy days, free from care or worry, helping mother, rocking Sister’s cradle, taking sewing lessons from mother sporting with my Brothers, making rafts to float over the mill pond, Roam the wild woods gathering Flowers, and building air castles.” (In her later reflections, she wrote exactly as this). When Moses was writing her memoir, My Life’s History, she described herself as a “tomboy” who believed that anything her brothers could do, she could do even better.
As a child, Moses would draw pictures and experiment with different styles. As much as she preferred that she stay at home and take care of the household, her father saw potential in the artist she had become. Cleary claims that: “Her father, a self-taught painter, would occasionally bring home sheets of newsprint, and she’d get to work on them right away. Before she began colouring, she would sketch out her design on the paper, then gather her “paints” (such as berry juice or a stick or two of carpenter’s chalk) and begin colouring. Even though her brothers made fun of her “lambscapes,” her father insisted she keep at it.”
Grandma Moses had a rudimentary education, which was the norm in rural areas at the time. After attending school for only a few months each year, she was expected to help her mother with household chores the rest of the year. Moses’ favourite school activity was drawing maps, which may have foreshadowed her future career path. Although she didn’t paint much as a child, Moses did a lot of other kinds of crafts, and she developed a particular skill with needlework. As a result of her father and aunt painting murals in their own homes, the family developed a friendly competition to see who could create the best art. When no one was at work, this became the family’s preferred method of keeping busy and passing the time.
Early Life
For a time in her life, beginning in her early teens, Moses all but abandoned art as a family hobby. This was largely due to her parents sending her away to board and work as a housekeeper when she was twelve years old. Over the next ten years, she would move around a lot and do a lot of different kinds of housework.
In 1886, at the age of 26, the young artist met a hired hand named Thomas Salmon Moses in one of these homes. In November 1887, after falling in love, the couple tied the knot. Moses later reflected on his wife’s desire for an equal partnership when speaking of their union: “Unlike some women who sit down and wait for someone to bring them sugar, when we first started working together, I believed that we were a team and that I had to contribute just as much as my husband did. Always trying to do my part.” During the early years of their marriage, Moses and her husband worked as hard on the numerous farms in various states. When they were hired to run a large dairy farm in Virginia, she became well-known for her home-made butter. Moses’ first years of marriage were largely devoted to caring for her young children. She gave birth to ten children, but five of them died shortly after birth.
Moses and her family returned to New York in 1905 after nearly two decades in the South, settling on an Eagle Bridge farm. Moses’ resumption of creative endeavours was a happy byproduct of the move. In 1918, Moses decided to create a fireboard landscape to cover the blank walls in her living room because she was short on wallpaper. She began painting again because she was having so much fun with it, but she only did so to give as gifts to friends and family during the holidays and at Christmas.
A sudden heart attack claimed the life of Moses’ devoted husband in the year 1927. Since then, he’s been encouraging Moses to paint more frequently. Her husband would later claim credit for her art when her career took off, saying, “I am not a superstitious person. However, there is a kind of veto power… It was as if he was involved in the painting business somehow.” After her husband’s death, Moses was able to devote more time to painting, turning to themes she was familiar with, such as farm activities like tapping trees for maple syrup, holiday gatherings, and depictions of places she had lived. Her grown son assumed the majority of the family’s farm responsibilities. Many of the images and prints she used for inspiration were kept in a trunk, which she referred to as her “art secrets.”
Mid Life
A local business encouraged the then-78-year-old Moses to include her paintings in an exhibition of artwork by women in the community at Thomas’ Drugstore, where she had previously failed to sell any at the county fair. When Louis Caldor, a New York City art collector driving through the area saw Moses’ paintings in 1938, it was enough to launch her career. As a result of his admiration for her innate talent, he bought everything she had to offer and then proceeded to Moses’ farm to meet with her about her work. But her daughter-in-law told him to come back tomorrow and Moses would show him an additional ten paintings, even though she wasn’t home at the time In order to meet her deadline, Moses spent the night searching her house for more paintings and was forced to cut a large one in half to make two paintings (something Caldor would not realise for some time). By purchasing the 10 paintings, Caldor reassured her of her talent and promised to spread the word about her work.
Caldor, on the other hand, had a difficult time convincing people to pay attention to Moses’ artwork at first. In spite of the criticism that his work was out of step with the then-dominant Surrealist and still-developing Abstract Expressionist movements, Caldor pressed on. In New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1939, Moses was included in the exhibition “Contemporary Unknown American Painters” Before long, Otto Kallir, the owner of a new gallery, became enamoured with Moses’ ability to capture the essence of American life through her “folk” paintings. First solo show, “What A Farm Wife Painted,” opened on October 8th, 1940, and Kallir helped establish Moses as an American artist in her own right. For the rest of her career, she would be known affectionately as “Grandma Moses” a name she was given in a review of this exhibition.
People began to fall in love with Moses and her paintings quickly gained popularity. With Carolyn Thomas, the owner of the drugstore that first exhibited her work, she travelled to New York City in 1940 to exhibit her paintings at the famed Gimbels department store. Many people came out to hear her speak about her work, as well as the jams and breads she had brought with her from her home. Moses later said that he was taken aback by the attention “They surprised me. I had no idea what they were up to since I had just arrived from the woods. The Thanksgiving Forum in Gimbels’ auditorium had 400 attendees instead of Mrs. Thomas, so I thought I was speaking to her.”
Demand for Grandma Moses’ paintings skyrocketed as her popularity grew, and she was inundated with requests. Since she had never fully embraced the “art world” she was taken aback by the interest in her work and remained modest about it. In a nutshell, “How much do you want to pay for this?’ Grandma Moses would say when asked about the cost of her work. As she saw it, smaller paintings should cost less because they use less paint.” Even Bob Hope, according to art historian Karal Ann Marling in his January 17, 1946 column, was a fan of her work “…boasted that he had just purchased a wintertime barnyard scene by G. Moses. ‘It’s so real that every time I walk through the living room, I can smell wood-smoke,’ he quipped. In the blink of an eye, she creates an original piece of art.” According to Marling, legendary songwriter Cole Porter allegedly never travelled without a large Grandma Moses snow scene to help his hotel suite feel like his home on the Waldorf Towers’ 41st floor, where another winterscape by Moses always hung in the place of honour over the piano.
Reproductions became an effective means of ensuring that everyone had a “Grandma Moses” of their own, as demand grew. A deal struck with the artist in 1947 resulted in a successful run of holiday cards featuring reproductions of original Moses paintings for Hallmark, for example. By the time she died, Marling claims, Moses had sold more than a billion Christmas cards. In addition, Marling explains how “In order to help those who could afford her cards but couldn’t afford the paintings that hung in galleries, Grandma Moses advised them to put shellac over the [card]. It will be just as enjoyable, if not more so.”
Other products based on Moses’ art include clothing for children, collector plates, aprons, fabrics, knitting bags, pillows, and sewing boxes. Given Moses’ modest means, the Richard Hudnut Company’s red lipstick was an outlier. In her Old Checkered House paintings, she used a red called “Primitive Red” as inspiration. An advertisement that appeared in every popular fashion magazine during this time period had a tag line that read, “It’s all about the sex,” according to Marling “For the woman who knows colour on canvas as instinctively as a primitive painter does, there’s Primitive Red. An unadulterated shade of red like love and life itself.”
Her appeal, Cleary explains, is based on the fact that, “By the end of the 1940s, Grandma Moses’ paintings had appeared in 65 exhibitions and nearly 50 solo shows. After the end of World War II, her name had become a household word in the United States, and her reputation had spread around the world as well. Museums across America were beginning to acquire works of art by “Grandma Moses” as early as the 1950s.” In 1949, President Harry S. Truman presented her with a Women’s National Press Club Award, which she accepted. She was invited to a private dinner party by the President, who was impressed by her attitude “even got him to try his hand at some piano playing. He reminded her of one of her own children, she said later.”
Moses’ birthday celebrations were also huge events. Norman Rockwell designed a seven-foot-wide cake for her 88th birthday party, which was organised by the Hallmark company as a publicity stunt. Moses had no idea who Rockwell was because he was so far removed from the hustle and bustle of city life. However, the two had a lot in common, and they became close friends, and Rockwell would attend many of their birthday parties in the future. When he painted the cover of the Saturday Evening Post’s Christmas issue in 1948, he even included Moses in the crowd.
Late Life
After becoming famous, Moses stayed true to the quiet life she had always led by quietly painting in her home. In the end, Kallir was able to persuade her to finally finish writing her biography. Gran Moses: My Life’s History, her 1952 autobiography, focused less on her career as an artist than on what she deemed to be her greatest accomplishments: her youth and raising a family. As well as detailing Moses’ family life, the book also expresses Moses’ ambivalence and feelings of conflict with regard to balancing the demands of being a mother, wife, and an artist. This is a worthwhile read.
Moses’ reputation was further bolstered by late-life television appearances. Playhouse of the Stars” actress Lilian Gish was cast in the role of the artist, and the two became close friends. She was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow on “See It Now” in 1955. Despite the fact that she was nearing the end of her life, she was adamant in her response to his question about what she would do for the next twenty years “I’m off to the mountains. Of course – of course I should. You shouldn’t expect to live much longer once you reach a certain age.” In her final years, she said that the overarching feeling of her entire life was like the feeling she had after a productive, hardworking day.
After her 100th birthday, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller proclaimed “Grandma Moses Day.” in honour of the artist. This year she illustrated a version of Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas” for Random House publishers, a major undertaking.
Moses’ health began to deteriorate in the early months of 1961, and she was forced to move into a nursing home after falling several times. Moses was adamantly opposed to this new arrangement, and “there were times when she was so annoyed with him that she would hide his stethoscope and refuse to reveal where it was unless he let her go back home.” A few weeks before the end of the year, at 101, she passed away peacefully on her nursing home bed.
Grandma Moses’ death was felt across the United States. Marling cites this as a reason “There were headlines everywhere about Grandma Moses’ death because she had been entertaining American breakfast tables for what seemed like an eternity with her wit and practical advice. Three of her paintings were displayed in the window of a New York shoe store (instead of shoes), and a large crowd gathered on Fifth Avenue to pay their respects.” When she died, President John F. Kennedy issued a statement confirming her ability to capture the spirit of the country: “Her death is a huge loss to American culture. Our perception of the American landscape was given a primitive freshness thanks to her paintings. Every American is saddened by her death. Her work and her life helped us remember our country’s roots in the countryside and on the frontier, and her legacy will live on for generations.”
Grandma Moses, despite being largely overlooked by art critics during her lifetime, was a widely popular artist in the American public’s eyes. A time of innocence, hard work, and family values was depicted in her work, which was created during a time when the country was coming to terms with the devastation wrought by World War II.
Aside from Moses, no one else was able to break the “art world elite.” At the same time as other pioneers of various artistic movements, it was an attempt to challenge the accepted definitions of traditional painting (albeit in a very different style). She elevated the status of nave, folk, outsider, Art Brut, and primitive art styles by painting in an untrained manner that refused to adhere to more traditional rules of classical art making. During the last decades of the twentieth century, the ideas and careers of Jean Dubuffet and Jean-Michel Basquiat, both of whom painted in a “childlike” style, were highly regarded, and Grandma Moses had started this powerful wave many years earlier. Her work laid the groundwork for artists like Vestie Davis, Howard Finster, Bryan Pearce, and Fred Yates to follow in her footsteps.
Famous Art by Grandma Moses
Shenandoah Valley
1938
The Shenandoah Valley in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley is depicted in this painting by Grandmother Moses. It appears as if the artist gathered foliage and used a collage technique to create the picture. In the foreground, three cows graze alongside a wooden rail fence in lush green fields and flowering trees. In the distance, a white house sits on the banks of a river, and the horizon fades into the mountains.
Catching the Thanksgiving Turkey
1943
Grandma Moses depicts a Thanksgiving-themed scene in this painting, as the title suggests. In the foreground, a group of turkeys gathered outside a white barn are being chased by four boys. With a rifle at the ready, the man dressed in a red coat and hat stands over the birds. A farmhouse can be seen on the painting’s left side. As a horse-drawn sleigh brings guests to the house, two people stand outside the open door. With a dark blue sky and white snowflakes, the scene is set. Although it’s a classic greeting card in the making, it also acknowledges that life is cyclical and can be brutal in its nature by incorporating death. The blood red paint used on the turkeys’ jackets and heads adds to the seriousness of this message.
Sugaring Off
1943
In keeping with the painting’s title, it depicts a flurry of activity during the winter months, with numerous people at work in the foreground boiling sap from maple trees to produce maple syrup. A church steeple and other houses can be seen in the background, and people in waggons are making their way to the sugaring off activities in the foreground. As a reminder that life here is both harsh and celebratory, it’s important to keep in mind that preparations can actually lead to greater appreciation for the results.
The Old Checkered House, 1853
1944
At the heart of this piece by Grandma Moses is an enormous house painted in alternating red and white squares. Rows of trees and hills can be seen in the distance in the lush country landscape. Moses is known for painting a beautiful horizon line that entices the viewer to explore and travel to new and exciting places (as much in mind as physically). This scene, like many of Moses’ paintings, depicts a child’s play set-up with a dolls’ house and a lot of toy horses in the foreground, which is typical of his style. Two soldiers stand talking to each other on the far left, while a soldier on a horse keeps a watchful eye on them. Horses are being cared for in the stables on the right side of the painting, where a number of carriages are seen arriving and departing.
May: Making Soap, Washing Sheep
1945
Men can be seen washing sheep in a pond next to the barn on the left. Besides churning butter, Moses was also known to work over a large boiling pot, where a woman is currently making soap. Other people are shown collecting eggs in this scene, which is set in the springtime amidst rolling hills and lush vegetation. Moses’ earlier artistic practises of embroidery and quilting are reflected in the work’s unusual collage quality. For a long time, Moses used fabric and needlework as her primary mediums, and it’s clear that her approach to painting was influenced by the techniques she developed for layering and combining smaller sections to create larger ones.
Hoosick River, Summer
1952
The Hoosick River is depicted in this painting by Grandma Moses. A man ploughs a field on the lower right while two girls in red dresses play with a boy around a large flowering tree in the foreground of the image. River depicted in the centre, with a single farmhouse and barn tucked away in the woods behind it. In contrast to Moses’ more typical, nostalgic renderings of idyllic scenes and traditional farming practises, the newly-built railroad focuses on the forces of social and technological change. There is a sense that the railroad was built in accordance with the land’s natural contours, but there is also a sense that industrial “progress” will soon affect these otherwise untouched scenes of natural beauty and happiness….
BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)
Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver
- Moses only began painting on a daily basis in her mid-70s, and she worked tirelessly until she was 100 years old.
- A national holiday has been established in her honour, making Grandma Moses a modern-day saint.
- Aside from her famous butter and jam, Moses was known for her many other crafts, including painting.
- Grandma Moses, unlike Grant Wood and the other American Regionalists, avoids the use of stylization and any ethical viewpoint in her depictions of pastoral America.
- Moses was a self-taught Outsider Artist, with “folk” and “naïve” tendencies, who worked primarily in isolation and had no formal training.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
