Moses, Grandma (Anna Mary Robertson Moses), 1860–1961, American painter, b. Washington co., N.Y., self-taught. She lived the arduous life of a farm wife, first in the Shenandoah Valley and later at Eagle Bridge, near Hoosick Falls, N.Y. In her late 70s, too frail to do hard work, she began to paint. Her pictures—called American primitives—are simple, gay scenes of farm life that struck the popular fancy and became widely known through prints and Christmas cards. She painted such subjects as The Old Oaken Bucket, Sugaring-Off, and Out for the Christmas Trees. Thanksgiving Turkey is in the Metropolitan Museum. At the age of 100 she illustrated " 'Twas the Night before Christmas" by Clement Moore (1962).

Bibliography

See her autobiography (1952) and study by O. Kallir (1973).

Moses, Grandma

orig. Anna Mary Robertson

(born Sept. 7, 1860, Greenwich, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 13, 1961, Hoosick Falls, N.Y.) U.S. painter. She began to produce embroidery pictures after her husband died in 1927. When arthritis impaired her embroidering, she turned to painting. She had her first exhibition in a drugstore in 1938 at age 78. She went on to produce more than 1,000 nostalgic, naively executed scenes of turn-of-the-century rural life (e.g., Catching the Thanksgiving Turkey, Over the River to Grandma's House). By 1939 her pictures were being exhibited internationally, and from 1946 they were regularly reproduced on holiday greeting cards.

Moses, (Anna Mary Robertson) Grandma (1860–1961) painter; born in Washington County, N.Y. She and her husband were farmers in Virginia and in Eagle Bridge, New York, where they settled (1907). The mother of ten children, she became a painter at the age of 78. Her distinctive folk paintings, such as Hoosick Falls in Winter (1943), and Thanksgiving Turkey (1943), have made her a popular artist throughout the world.