I've heard references to Grandma Moses all my life. I never stopped to think what she represented. Was she a character in a book? I just never stopped to ask, just let the name be part of the landscape of my life. Maybe I had a sense that people referred to someone living nearly forever as Gramma Moses. I may have assumed being a Gramma Moses meant you harked back nearly to ancient time, based on the name Moses, as in Biblical. Recently I came across a reference to Grandma Moses in a book and decided to find out more. She did live to be 101 but that's not what she's famous for.
It turns out her fame comes from her art! Named Anna Mary Robertson at birth, her beginnings were humble; her father ran a flax mill and farmed. As a child, Moses made her own paints from things she could easily find on the farm: fruit juice, flour paste, grasses, lime and sawdust. She only went to school for a short time. At age 12, she struck out on her own and for fifteen years, worked on a large neighboring farm, housekeeping, sewing and embroidering. At age 27, she married Thomas Salmon Moses. She and her husband worked on five different farms and eventually had one of their own. They had ten children, of whom five survived past infancy.
Moses began painting in earnest at age 78 when her arthritis started preventing her from embroidering. She painted scenes of simple country life. Her art gained popularity in the 1950s and was on the covers of a number of magazines. The one-room school she briefly attended in Vermont is now the Bennington Museum and has the largest collection of her works .
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