Grandma Moses
gigatos | March 27, 2022
Summary
Anna Mary Robertson Moses or Grandma Moses, born Anna Mary Robertson († December 13, 1961 in Hoosick Falls, New York) was a U.S. painter, illustrator, and proponent of Naive Art. Remarkably, she did not begin painting until she was 75 years old.
Anna Mary Robertson was born the third of five children to Mary Shannahan Robertson and Russell King Robertson. She attended school only briefly and left her parents” farm at the age of twelve to work as a maid.
On November 9, 1887, at the age of 27, she married the farmer Thomas Salmon Moses, from then on she no longer worked as a maid. With him she moved to the US state of Virginia. She gave birth to ten children, five of whom died in infancy. When her husband died after a heart attack on January 15, 1927, and her youngest son took over the farm with his wife, Grandma Moses turned to painting for employment. She had enjoyed painting as a child, but had rarely gotten around to it because of a variety of household duties. Even in her later employment as a maid and during her marriage, she had not been able to develop her painting talent for lack of time. Only the decoration of the family living quarters had given her the opportunity to be creative.
At the age of 75, when daily housework became too difficult for her due to her rheumatism condition, Grandma Moses started making pictures on the advice of her sister Celestia. At first she embroidered wool pictures and used ordinary painter”s paints. Later, when she also had to give up embroidery, she turned to oil paints and canvas. Encouraged by her children, Grandma Moses exhibited some of her paintings at a drugstore in Hoosick Falls. Art collector Louis Caldor, who came to Hoosick Falls in 1938, took some of the paintings to New York. After several unsuccessful attempts to interest the art world in these works, he was actually going to discontinue his efforts in 1939. But when he happened to learn of a planned small exhibition called “Unknown Contemporary American Painters” at the Museum of Modern Arts, he took another crack at it. Three paintings by Grandma Moses were selected for the exhibition. As a result, gallery owner Otto Kallir became involved with her work. Grandma Moses had her first solo exhibition in 1940 at the St. Etienne Gallery founded by Kallir . In 1949, she was invited to tea by then U.S. President Harry S. Truman and his wife Bess. Together with Hildegard Bachert, he published her memoirs in 1952 and the catalog raisonné in 1973. It took years, however, for her work to become more widely known. She died on December 13, 1961, at the age of 101. Prior to that, the then governor of New York, which had been her residence again since shortly before her husband”s death, Nelson Rockefeller had declared her 100th and 101st birthdays “Grandma Moses Day.”
Grandma Moses” pictures offer the viewer insights into the simple life in the North American countryside at that time. In the process, Grandma Moses processed many personal experiences. Around 30 major works are on display at the Bennington Museum in Vermont.
At the beginning of her artistic career, she painted on hardboard because it was more durable than canvas, made the frames for her paintings herself, and did not own an easel, but painted on her kitchen table.
Critics have compared her style with that of the painters Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the Younger and Henri Rousseau. She left an œuvre of about 1500 paintings.
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