Older Artist Spotlight: Grandma Moses

Anna Mary Robertson was born on September 7th, 1860, and left home at the age of 10 to work as a hired girl at a neighboring farm. There, she grew up and eventually married, becoming Anna Mary Moses, and gave birth to ten children, five of whom survived. As a hobby, she began embroidering and knitting colorful farm scenes. However, at the age of 78, arthritis rendered her fingers too weak to embroider, and she began painting as an alternative. 

She wasn’t particular with her materials at first. Painting with leftover house paint on scraps of canvas and fireboard, Moses had little to no education and practice in drawing with perspective and proportion, techniques of fine art commonly scrutinized over. Instead, she painted with the sole goal of expressing herself, and creating art. 

Moses viewed painting in plein air, or outdoors, as “impractical” and chose to focus on “whatever the mind can produce”. Her paintings of rolling hills and quaint farm life were painted directly from her imagination, and she abstracted and adapted some landscape compositions from greeting cards, prints, and magazines. She also deliberately chose to not include telephone poles, vehicles and other results of industrialization in her work, focusing instead on the nature she grew up surrounded by living on a farm. Nicknamed “Grandma Moses” by a reviewer at the Herald Tribune, her  paintings quickly became popular for their nostalgic charm, and she continued exhibiting her work internationally until the age of 90. 

Calhoun, 1955

Photo by Ifor Thomas, Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York

Sources:

https://nmwa.org/art/collection/calhoun/ 

https://nmwa.org/art/artists/grandma-moses-anna-mary-robertson-moses/