Grandma Moses

Artist, born in Greenwich, New York, USA. She grew up on a farm, married farmer Thomas Salmon Moses in 1887 and had 10 children, five of whom died in infancy. Afflicted with arthritis in her 70s, she was forced to give up sewing and began to paint colourful childhood country scenes in a primitive style, such as ‘Catching the Thanksgiving Turkey’ (c.1938), ‘Over the River to Grandma's House’ (c.1938), and ‘A Country Wedding’ (1951). Her works were spotted by an art dealer and she held her first show in New York City in 1940, achieving great popular success throughout the USA. She died at the age of 101. In 2006 an exhibition of her works, ‘Grandma Moses: Grandmother to the Nation’, began a national tour at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY.

Grandma Moses (September 7, 1860 – December 13, 1961) was a renowned American folk artist.

She was born Anna Mary Robertson in Greenwich, New York.

As a child, she used fruit juice to paint on pieces of wood or materials her father brought home for her.

She spent most of her life as a farmer's wife and the mother of 5 children.

She began painting in her seventies after abandoning a career in embroidery because of arthritis.

Her artwork was discovered by Louis J. This brought her to the attention of art collectors all over the world, and her paintings were highly sought after.

In 1946, her painting "The Old Checkered Inn in Summer" was featured in the background of a national advertising campaign for the young women's lip gloss "PRIMITIVE RED" by Du Barry cosmetics.

President Harry S.

Grandma Moses painted mostly scenes of rural life.

"Grandma" Moses celebrated her 100th birthday on the 7th of September, 1960. Life magazine commissioned Cornell Capa to make a portrait of Moses for the occasion, which it printed as a cover article. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller also proclaimed the day "Grandma Moses Day" in her honor.

She died at Hoosick Falls on December 13, 1961 and is buried at the Maple Grove Cemetery. Her gravestone is inscribed with this epitaph: "Her primitive paintings captured the spirit and preserved the scene of a vanishing countryside."

For a sense of the current value of her paintings, a September 2nd 1942 piece entitled "The Old Checkered House, 1862" was appraised at the Memphis 2004 Antiques Roadshow.