Grandma Moses
Anna Mary Robertson Moses
Early Life
Photo by Ifor Thomas, Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses was a self-taught American Folk Artist known internationally for her work. Born on September 7th, 1860, in Greenwich, NY, Anna Mary was of Scottish-Irish ancestry; her great grandfather was one of the first wagon makers in Rensselaer County and her father, Russell King Robertson, was a flax grower. Until the age of 12, when she went to work as a ‘hired girl’ on a neighboring farm helping a wealthier family with the household chores, Anna Mary lived with her family on their farm with her 9 brothers and sisters.
At the age of 15 she went to Eagle Bridge to work for Mrs. Abraham Vandenberg, who was kind enough to let her go to the district school, and in 1886, she became the hired girl on the Sylvester James Farm in Eagle Bridge and there met Thomas Moses, the hired man and her soon-to-be husband.
At 27, Anna Mary married Thomas Salmon Moses in 1887 and they moved to Virginia, where they would start their family. In 1905, when Anna Mary was 45, the family bought a farm near Eagle Bridge, NY and moved back to Rensselaer County.
Career
It wasn’t until the death of her husband in 1927 that Anna Mary began her artistic career. Following Thomas’s death, Anna Mary began to entertain herself and her friends by making needlework pictures and quilts portraying colorful scenes of farm life.
At 78, when arthritis rendered her unable to embroider, friends suggested that she try painting these scenes instead. However, as a self-taught artist working in rural New York, Moses lacked access to high-quality art materials in the early part of her career. Without any small brushes, she used matches and pins to paint details such as eyes and mouths.
Grandma Moses, Calhoun, 1955; Oil on pressed wood, 16 x 24 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay; © Grandma Moses Properties
In her 79th year she sent some of her pictures to the Thomas drugstore in Hoosick Falls. They were noticed and admired by an engineer, Louis J. Caldor, who then bought them and took them to New York City where eventually they were shown to Dr. Otto Kallir, owner of the Galerie St. Etienne. Dr. Kallir arranged Anna Mary Moses’s first one-woman show which opened on Oct. 9, 1940 under the title, What a Farmwife Painted.
Moses’s nostalgic depictions of rural America were widely reproduced. Her paintings were licensed by Hallmark, which sold 16 million greeting cards featuring her paintings in 1947 alone. One could buy fabric and plates printed with images of her paintings, and even a record called “The Grandma Moses Suite.”
What’s in a Name?
When Moses first began exhibiting her work, she was simply referred to as Mrs. Moses. An art critic noted in a 1940 New York Herald Tribune review that her neighbors called her Grandma Moses, and the name stuck. Did you know that Moses had nine grandchildren and over thirty great-grandchildren?
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, c. 1950.
Grandma Moses has received two honorary doctorates, one of them from Russell Sage College; two Art Directors Club awards, the Women's National Press Club award for outstanding accomplishment in art and the New York State Prize of 1941. The Press Club award was presented to her by former President Harry S. Truman in Washington in 1949.
“All of which is pretty good going for a little old lady who thinks of herself, first and foremost, as a Rensselaer County farmwife.” - The Times Record, Troy, NY Sept 3, 1960