Moses, Grandma

Moses, Grandma (born Anna Mary Robertson) (1860–1961). The most famous of American naive painters. She was born on a farm at Greenwich in Washington County, New York State, of Irish and Scottish ancestry. In 1887 she married a farmer, Thomas Moses; they lived in Virginia for 20 years, then returned to New York State, where Anna spent the rest of her life within a few miles of her birthplace. She regularly won prizes with embroidery at county fairs, and when arthritis made it impossible for her to continue with this in her 70s, she took up painting, initially copying postcards and popular prints. At first her work was crude, but she soon developed a lively, fresh, and colourful style, abounding in lovingly observed detail. Her first exhibition was held in a drugstore in Hoosick Falls, New York State, and her work was ‘discovered’ there by Louis J. Caldor, an engineer and art collector who happened to be passing through the town. In 1940, at the age of 80, she had a one-woman show at the Galerie St Etienne in New York, and thereafter she rapidly became famous and something of a national institution, her work being widely reproduced, notably on Christmas cards (her winter scenes were ideal for this; she sometimes dusted ‘glitter’ over the snow to make it look more realistic to her eye). In 1949 she was received at the White House by President Harry Truman, and in 1960 Governor Nelson Rockefeller proclaimed 7 September—her 100th birthday—‘Grandma Moses Day’ in New York State. She produced more than 1,000 pictures (working on a sort of production line system, three or four at a time, painting first the skies and last the figures), her favourite subjects being scenes of what she called the ‘old-timey’ farm life she had known in her younger days. She described this life in her autobiography, My Life's History (1952); in the preface Otto Kallir writes that ‘Her kind and good-natured approach to everything that surrounds her can be felt in her personal presence as well as in her work'. Her paintings are in many American collections, notably the Bennington Museum, Vermont.