Grandma Moses

American, 1860-1961

Grandma Moses, born Anna Mary Robertson in Greenwich, New York, was a self‑taught folk artist whose late‑life turn to painting made her one of the most beloved chroniclers of rural American life. Raised on a farm and tasked early with domestic and farm duties, she spent much of her adult life working alongside her husband and children in Virginia and later in upstate New York. Though she drew as a child and made embroidered pictures in her later years, it was only after arthritis made needlework difficult, around age seventy‑eight, that she began painting in earnest.

Her work is celebrated for its nostalgic portrayal of seasonal rhythms, community gatherings, landscape, animals, and pastoral chores—scenes recalled from memory rather than contemporary industrial life. She painted on whatever materials were at hand, often using leftover boards or repurposed surfaces, and approached perspective and scale with little formal concern, giving her images a distinctive simplicity and warmth. Grandma Moses’s career took off when a chance discovery of her paintings in a drugstore window led to her first exhibitions in 1939‑40. From that point on her art was widely exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, reproduced for greeting cards and prints, and embraced by a growing public fascinated by her vision.

She continued painting into her hundreds, producing well over a thousand artworks before her death at age 101 in Hoosick Falls, New York. Today her legacy persists not only in museums and collections but in her demonstration that artistic vision and recognition can flourish at any age, rooted in memory, sentiment, and love of place.