Grandma Moses

1860-1961 · Eagle Bridge, New York, USA

A farmwife who took up painting at 78 because arthritis made embroidery hurt, and by 100 was the most famous artist in America.

The life

Anna Mary Robertson was born in Greenwich, upstate New York, in 1860, went out to work as a hired girl at twelve, and married farmer Thomas Moses at twenty-seven. They farmed in Virginia and then at Eagle Bridge, New York. In her seventies she made embroidered pictures until arthritis made the needle painful, and her sister suggested paint would be easier. In 1938 a collector named Louis Caldor spotted her paintings in a Hoosick Falls drugstore window; by 1939 she was in a MoMA showcase, and in 1940 her first solo show, What a Farm Wife Painted, opened at Galerie St. Etienne in New York. Time covers, a documentary and a presidential-scale fame followed. She died in 1961, aged 101.

The work

Oil on pressed board: haying, sugaring, Thanksgiving, winter villages, the rural New York of her youth painted from memory with the tractors deliberately left out. She priced her first paintings at three to five dollars; late ones sold for thousands. The Bennington Museum holds the largest collection, and she hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Why we love them

Proof that it is never too late by the widest margin ever recorded. She started at 78 and still got a quarter-century career out of it.

Go deeper

• Grandma Moses at the Outsider Art Fair
• Grandma Moses on Wikipedia
• Bennington Museum
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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