ANNA MARY MOSES

Born in Greenwich, New York, Grandma Moses is the pivotal figure of the 20th-century American folk art movement, known for her decorative, naive landscape and genre paintings of rural New England. She had a precise way of organizing color and pattern.

Most of her life was spent in eastern New York State where she was the child of a Scottish-Irish farm family and led what she later described as a very happy childhood. Her father encouraged her to draw and paint on unused newsprint, which he brought home to keep the children busy, and she used berry juice to brighten her pictures.

At age twelve, she became a hired girl, learning household arts. She married Thomas Salmon Moses and was a conventional farm wife, living with him on a large farm near Staunton, Virginia and bearing ten children, but only five survived. She loved the scenery of the Shenandoah Valley, but never had time to paint it while she lived there.

She and her husband returned to New York State to a dairy farm in a small village of Eagle Bridge, where she spent the remainder of her life. Occasionally she did paintings for holiday gifts, but never took it seriously. However, her husband gave her work much praise, and after his death, when she was in her 70s, she was too weak for hard labor, so she filled her time with stitchery landscape pictures.

Her children thought her work was so appealing they encouraged her to transfer her talent with color and design to painting; her first was on canvas from a threshing machine cover. Her daughter-in-law took her pictures to the women's exchange in the local drugstore in Hoosick Falls, and Louis Caldor, a private collector from out of town, was highly impressed. He bought the first group and visiting Moses, purchased more.

He tried to sell them to museums and galleries, but had little response. The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. was the first museum to acquire her work, which gradually began to attract much attention. The U.S. Office of Information began to promote her painting as representative of America, and in 1939, she was featured in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. By the 1940s, she was a household word, a celebrity who was entertained in the White House. She had a television interview with Edward R. Murrow when she was over ninety and lived to be 101 years.

As a thrifty housewife, she was appalled at the high prices her paintings brought and had to have a special manager of her affairs. But Americans love her work for the nostalgia of happy times in the past they suggest, and they are willing to pay large sums for the images she creates.

The Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont is the primary public repository of her paintings and has two galleries of ongoing exhibitions of her work.

Source: "American Women Artists" by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein

From website: http://www.askart.com/askart/artist.aspx?artist=24680