Happy 150th Birthday, Grandma Moses!

Anna Mary Robertson was born on a farm on this date—September 7—in 1860. She lived the life of a farmer's wife until the death of her husband, Thomas Moses, in 1927. Widowhood pushed Anna Mary Moses into retirement from farming, and in the mid-1930s she began to paint rural vignettes. Word about her homespun pictures began to disseminate as she entered her octogenarian years. By the time Moses died at the age of 101, she was an international celebrity artist known as “Grandma Moses.”

 

Her art was simple and uplifting. Farm life and the joyful spirit of family enterprise serve the visual core of her work.  While the academic term for her work is called “naïve”—Moses was untrained as an artist and her work was being shown in a small town drugstore when it was spotted by a New York collector—the initial response to her work went well beyond the academy.

 

Late in her life, the artist was invited to the White House, and in 1969, she was posthumously honored on an American postage stamp. Grandma Moses died in 1961; her paintings are now monuments on the American cultural landscape.

 

 

Image:  Anna Mary Robertson Moses, 1860-1961 / Clara Sipprell / Gelatin Silver print, c.1950 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Katie Louchheim

 

--Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Comments

[nancy]

It's simply amazing that she lived to 101 years... I wonder if it's due to living on the farm - which means plenty of fresh air and moderate amount of physical labor.

[John Miles]

Truly amazing. Her work is also a lesson in how we can all contribute to the American cultural landscape with enough determination.