“…get an inspiration and start painting; then I’ll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live.” – Grandma Moses on her “old-timey” New England Landscapes.
Anna Mary Robertson, born in Greenwich, NY, the day after yesterday’s subject Jane Addams, was the 3rd of 10 children. Her parents were Margaret (Shanahan) and Russel King Robertson. She briefly attended a one-room schoolhouse which is now the Bennington Museum which now houses a large collection of her works. She left home at 12 to do farm work, keep house, cook, and sew for wealthy families.
Page 61 of the 1870 census for Easton, NY, consists of 60 residents of a farming community. The Robertson family consists of father Russell, a farmer with real estate valued at $6,000, his wife Margaret, a housewife, and 6 of their children. They would end up with a total of 10. Besides farming, Russell at some point ran a flax mill.
There were two immigrants from Ireland living among 38 native New Yorkers.
Later life
Anna married Thomas Salmon Moses, and the two bought a farm near Staunton, Virginia, and lived there for twenty years before moving to Verona, Virginia, and then to Eagle Ridge, New York. They had ten children, but only five survived infancy. Her husband died in 1927 and she retired from farming in 1936 and moved in with her daughter.
Anna was always creative. Sheriefly painted when she was young, making paint from lemon and grape juice. As an adult, she embroidered, quilted, and made hobby art. She developed arthritis at age 76 and switched to painting when she couldn’t embroider anymore. Her first painting was a gift for the postman because it “was easier to make [a painting] than to bake a cake over a hot stove.”
She created 1,500 paintings in three decades. She charged $3 to $5. An art collector saw some displayed in a drugstore and bought the whole supply. The next year, three of them were exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition titled “Contemporary Unknown American Painters.” Her first solo exhibition was “What a Farm Wife Painted.”
Her fame gradually grew to where her paintings were used to publicize American holidays, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Mother’s Day. Mademoiselle Magazine named her a “Young Woman of the Year” when she was 88 years old. A film documentary of her life was nominated for an Acadamy Award, and she published an autobiography where she said:
“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 offered. And life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.”
The character of Granny, played by Irene Ryan on The Beverly Hillbillies was named Daisy Mae Moses in honor of Grandma Moses.
Upon Grandma Moses’s death in 1961, at age 101, John F. Kennedy said:
“The death of Grandma Moses removed a beloved figure from American life. The directness and vividness of her paintings restored a primitive freshness to our perception of the American scene. Both her work and her life helped our nation renew its pioneer heritage and recall its roots in the countryside and on the frontier. All Americans mourn her loss.”
More information about Grandma Moses
Other happenings on September 7, 1860:
- The PS Lady Elgin is accidentally rammed and sunk in Lake Michigan; hundreds drown.
- Giuseppe Garibaldi’s forces captured Naples.
Tomorrow – A Disgruntled Office Seeker
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Sources
- Wikipedia.org
- Ancestry.com
- Onthisday.com
- Picryl.com
- Youtube.com
Famous People and Their First Census 