Grandma Moses

Grandma Moses is among the most celebrated twentieth-century painters of the United States, yet she had barely started painting before she was in her late seventies. As she once said of herself: "Would never sit back in a rocking chair, waiting for someone to help me." No one could have had a more productive old age. She was born Anna Mary Robertson on a farm in New York State, one of five boys and five girls. ("We came in bunches, like radishes.") At twelve she left home and was in domestic service until, at twenty-seven, she married Thomas Moses, the hired hand of one of her employers. They farmed most of their lives, first in Virginia, and then in New York State, at Eagle Bridge. She had ten children, of whom five survived; her husband died in 1927.

Grandma Moses painted a little as a child and made embroidery pictures as a hobby, but only switched to oils in old age because her hands had become too stiff to sew and she wanted to keep busy and pass the time. Her pictures were first sold at the local drugstore and at a fair, and were soon spotted by a dealer who bought everything she painted. Three of the pictures were exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1910 she had her first exhibition in New York. Between the 1930s and her death she produced some 2 000 pictures detailed and lively portrayals of the rural life she had known for so long, with a marvelous sense of color and form. "I think real hard till I think of something real pretty, and then I paint it," she said.