Grandma Moses

(American, 1860–1961)

Grandma Moses was an American artist known for her pastoral landscape paintings. She represented scenes through the flat patterns of cross-stitching and used bright color schemes. Similar in style to other self-taught American painters, including Edward Hicks and Horace Pippin, the nostalgic character of Moses’s work reflects her life on farms in rural New York and Virginia. “A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow,” she reflected. “Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.” Born Anna Mary Robertson on September 7, 1860 in Greenwich, NY, she didn’t take up painting until her late 70s when arthritis made embroidering difficult. In 1939, the New York art collector Louis Caldor stumbled across Moses’s work in a drugstore window while travelling upstate through Hoosick Falls, NY. After inquiring as to who made them, he drove to her farm and purchased 15 of her paintings on the spot. Later that same year, three of the works from Caldor’s initial purchase were included in the “Contemporary Unknown American Painters” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. This led to a solo exhibition at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York in 1940 and over 100 more shows in the following decades. The artist produced around 2,000 paintings before her death at age 101 on December 13, 1961 in Hoosick Falls, NY. Today, her works are included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Bennington Museum in Vermont.