cMoses, Anna Mary Robertson1860╨1961╥Grandma Moses,╙ painterBorn on September 7, 1860, on a farm in Greenwich, New York, Anna Robertson grew up there and from the age of eleven near Easton, New York. She had only a few months╒ schooling during the summers of her childhood. About the age of thirteen she left home to earn her living as a hired girl. After her marriage to Thomas Moses in September 1887 the couple lived near Staunton, Virginia, until 1905. In that year they settled on a farm near Eagle Bridge, Rensselaer County, New York, where she lived the rest of her life. Thomas Moses died in 1927, and his widow continued to farm until 1936. Anna Moses had enjoyed drawing pictures as a child, and in 1918 she tried painting a scene on the fireboard of her fireplace, but it was not until her late seventies, when arthritis forced her to give up making worsted embroidery pictures, that she turned to oil paints to occupy her time. At first she copied illustrated postcards and Currier & Ives prints, but gradually she began to recreate scenes from her childhood, as in ╥Apple Pickers╙ and ╥Sugaring-Off.╙ Her early paintings were given away or sold for small sums. In 1939 several of her paintings that were hanging in a drugstore window in Hoosick Falls, New York, impressed Louis Caldor, in engineer and art collector, who then drove to her farm and bought her remaining stock of 15 paintings. In October of that year three of those paintings were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in a show entitled ╥Contemporary, Unknown Painters.╙ From the beginning her work received favorable criticism. In October 1940 a one-woman show of 35 paintings was held at Galerie St. Etienne in New York City. In November of that year Gimbel╒s department store brought ╥Grandma╙ Moses to New York City on the opening day of a Thanksgiving exhibition of her works. Thereafter, her paintings were shown throughout the United States and in Europe in some 150 solo shows and 100 more group exhibits. Grandma Moses produced some 2,000 paintings in all, mainly on masonite board. Her naive style (labeled American primitive) was acclaimed for its purity of color, its attention to detail, and its vigor. Other notable paintings included ╥Out for the Christmas Trees,╙ ╥Catching the Thanksgiving Turkey,╙ ╥The Old Oaken Bucket,╙ ╥The Old Checkered House,╙ ╥Black Horses,╙ and ╥From My Window.╙ From 1946 her paintings were often reproduced in prints and on Christmas cards. Her autobiography, My Life╒s History, was published in 1952. She died on December 13, 1961, at the age of a hundred and one, in Hoosick Falls, New York. ╓styl `
