Grandma Moses
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From Grove Art Online: (b Greenwich, NY, 7 Sept 1860; d Hoosick Falls, NY, 13 Dec 1961).
American painter. The third of ten children, she was encouraged as a child by her father to paint and draw. She worked on a neighbouring farm from the age of 12 until her marriage to Thomas Salmon Moses in 1887. The couple became farmers in Virginia and in 1905 purchased a farm in Eagle Bridge, NY. She decorated certain objects in her home with painted scenes, but it was only in her 70s, with no previous training, that she began to make pictures with embroidered yarn; finding that stiffness in her hands made it difficult to hold a needle, she soon started painting in oils.
In 1938 some pictures by Moses were seen at the Woman's Exchange of a drugstore at Hoosick Falls, NY, by the collector Louis J. Caldor (1900-73), who brought them to the attention of Sidney Janis and Otto Kallir (1894-1978). Janis included three of her paintings in the exhibition Contemporary Unknown American Painters held in 1939 in the Members' Rooms of MOMA, NY, and devoted a chapter to her in his study of American primitive painters published three years later; Kallir presented her first one-woman exhibition, What a Farm Wife Painted, at Galerie St Etienne in New York in 1940. It was in a review of the latter exhibition in the New York Herald Tribune that she was first referred to in print as Grandma Moses. Soon afterwards she enjoyed great public success with an exhibition at Gimbel's, a New York department store, and became a celebrity in the USA.
Moses's pictures, painted in oil on board and widely distributed as reproductions on greeting cards, fabrics, tiles and wallpapers, generally treated rural scenes drawn from her own experience or painted in response to the words of old songs. In her lyrical landscapes, usually inspired by her farm and its view of the Green Mountains in neighbouring Vermont, she concentrated her attention on conveying atmosphere and seasonal changes but also used dabs of paint to depict figures in a variety of activities; a typical example is Wash Day (1945; Providence, RI, Sch. Des., Mus. A.), in which women and children are shown washing and folding sheets and clothing in front of farm buildings, with a wealth of incidental detail.
In many cases Moses copied details from lithographs published by Currier & Ives, from newspapers and magazine illustrations and from other forms of popular illustration as elements in her original compositions. The contrast between the rather primitive treatment of figures and buildings and the relative naturalism of the landscape elements, which may be regarded as typical of much Naive art, can be ascribed to the fact that she was self-taught. Her works often suggest a bygone era, especially as they often depict horse-drawn vehicles and women in long dresses. She repeated themes on request but changed each version, for example by varying the season. In winter scenes such as Hoosick Falls, NY in Winter (1944; Washington, DC, Phillips Col.) she used pale greys for the winter skies and flaked mica to depict the glitter of the snow. She also produced pictures on historical themes, landscapes inspired by memories of Virginia and a few indoor scenes. (Source: RUTH BASS, "Grandma Moses," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press) Accessed February 10, 2004) http://www.groveart.com
