Grandma Moses (1860-1961) was Anna Mary Robertson Moses, an American farm wife from upstate New York who began painting in her late seventies and became the best-known folk painter in the United States. Her crowded, cheerful scenes of country life, such as Sugaring Off and July Fourth, ended up in galleries, on Christmas cards and on a postage stamp, and she was 101 when she died.
She did not set out to become an artist. Arthritis made her embroidery painful, and her sister suggested she try paint instead.
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The legend says she started at the age when most people stop. Look at the years before and a different woman appears. She had worked for most of her life, first as a hired girl in a neighbor's house, then on farms in Virginia and New York, raising the five of her ten children who lived. All that time she made pictures, stitched in worsted yarn, and gave them away.
When she finally put paint on a board, nobody wanted it. She sold her first pictures in local drugstores and at fairs, for three to five dollars each, depending on size, and the response was weak. In her autobiography she remembered winning a prize for her fruit and jam, "but no pictures."
Two years after a stranger bought out a drugstore window, she had a solo show in a New York gallery, and a title that told the whole story: What a Farmwife Painted.
What You'll Discover
Who she was before the brush.
Who bought everything in that window.
What she left out of every scene.
What she answered her critics.
How a farm wife became a household name.