HER HILLS OF HOME
by Libby Clay
Anna Mary Robertson Moses' hills of home are in Washington County, New York, near the Vermont and Massachusetts borders. Coincidentally, a number of her limner predecessors also hailed from this "border country." Perhaps the beauty of the area was especially conducive to artistic expression.
"Grandma" Moses was born on September 7, 1860, one of ten children in a farming family. Her education was scanty, just a few years in a one-room schoolhouse. When she was twelve she began working as a hired girl on neighboring farms. She supported herself this way for fifteen years, and, in 1887, married the hired hand on one of the farms, Thomas Salmon Moses.
The newlyweds first made their home in Virginia, working various farms. They had ten children, five of whom survived. After eighteen years, the "hills of home" beckoned, and they moved back to New York state, to a dairy farm in Eagle Bridge, thirty miles from Albany. They worked the farm until Thomas's death in 1927.
The children took over the running of the farm, and it was then that Grandma Moses' second career began. At last she had leisure time. At first she created pictures in embroidery, but by her seventies her arthritic hands made this too difficult. She took up painting. "If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens," she wrote in her memoir, for idle hands were unthinkable to her.
At first she copied her bucolic scenes from Currier and Ives-type prints and postcards. While she continued to use such images as source material, over the years her own broad, quilt-like arrangement of landscape elements developed.
She had an extraordinary gift for visualizing the past, and her memories served her well. "I like pretty things the best," she said. "What's the use of painting a picture if it isn't something nice? I like to paint old-timey things, historical landmarks of long ago..." Thanksgiving Days, first snows, and seasonal activities were the pretty things she chose.
Grandma Moses was "discovered" by a New York collector, Louis Caldor. In 1938 he saw her paintings displayed in the window of a drug store in Hoosick Falls. He bought her best works (priced between three dollars and five dollars) and begged her to produce more. He showed them to New York galleries, but there was little interest. For one thing, her age made it unlikely that she would produce many more paintings—or so the dealers reasoned. Eventually an Austrian art dealer, Otto Kallir, was intrigued by her "astonishing mastery" of landscape and gave her a one-person show called "What a Farm Wife Painted." The year was 1940 and she was eighty years old. A late bloomer! Only three paintings sold, and prices ranged from twenty to two hundred fifty dollars; but her career was launched, and she lived to paint for 21 more years.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses' recollections and recreations of idyllic nineteenth-century country life appealed to a war-weary and disenchanted America. Like Currier and Ives prints, her work told of an earlier golden age of peace and agricultural prosperity.
The media, too, made her a star. She was everyone's perfect grandma and made wonderful copy. Newspapers, radio, television and many reproductions of her work on greeting cards and posters made "Grandma Moses" a household name. Gimbels department store in New York City centered a Thanksgiving festival around her work and persuaded her to give a public talk in the city. Her sincerity and forthrightness charmed the jaded press corps. She appeared on the covers of Time and Life, met President Truman. Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of New York, declared "Grandma Moses Day" on her 100th birthday. Today, adult visitors to MAG invariably pause to enjoy My Hills of Home (53.3). They recognize her work and smile.
She died in 1961 and completed twenty-five paintings in her 101st year! She had lived a lifetime doing the impossible. "I look back on my life like a good day's work, it was done and I feel satisfied with it. I was happy and contented. I knew nothing better and made the best out of what life had offered. And life is what we make it, always has been, always will be."
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