Folk artist Grandma Moses embarked on a new career at age 76, and soon became world-famous. Follow the facts on this incredible senior citizen.
• Anna Mary Robertson’s life started out simply on a New York state farm the year before the Civil War began. With 10 children in the family, it became necessary for Anna, at age 12, to move in with a wealthy neighboring family as a live-in housekeeper. For the next 15 years, she kept house, cooked, and sewed for various families. At 27, she met and married the hired man from the farm where she worked, Thomas Moses, and the pair continued working for others for nearly 20 years. The couple had 10 children, five of whom survived infancy. When she was 46, they moved into their own house for the first time.
• Always a creative and artistic person, Anna enjoyed quilting, embroidering and other needlecrafts, creating masterpieces for friends and family. But around age 76, painful arthritis made it difficult for her to hold an embroidery needle. Her sister suggested painting might be easier, and Anna took up her brush. She began with depictions of simple rural life, which she called “old-timey” landscapes. No modern conveniences, such as tractors or telephone poles were seen in her work.
• Anna began selling her paintings, charging $3.00 to $5.00 each, depending on its size. She sold them at the county fair, right alongside her home-canned pickles. But it was a display in the local drug store in 1938, when she was 78, that launched her career. Louis Caldor was an engineer, as well as an art collector, traveling through upstate New York, when he spied her work in the window of the store. He bought every painting, plus 10 more she had on hand at home, paying no more than $5.00 apiece.
• The following year, three Grandma Moses paintings were included in an exhibit in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. By 1940, she had her first solo exhibition entitled “What a Farm Wife Painted,” at another New York City gallery. As her fame increased, the price increased to $8,000 – $10,000. Anna went on to hold more than 100 exhibitions over the next 20 years.
• Anna painted every day for 25 years, producing more than 1,500 canvasses. In 1950, when Grandma Moses was 92, filmmaker Jerome Hill directed a documentary of her life, a film that was nominated for an Academy Award. Two years later, she published her autobiography, “My Life’s History.” She had this to say about her life: “I look back on my life like a good day’s work, it was done and I feel satisfied with it. I made the best out of what life offered.” She died in 1961 at age 101.
• The paintings of Grandma Moses can be found in many major museums, include New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian Museum of Art. When they come on the market, they frequently sell for over $1 million. In 2006, her 1943 painting, “Sugaring Off,” sold at auction for $1.2 million.
