Career
She worked for several families, cooking, cleaning, gardening, ironing, and tending invalids.
They took a wedding trip to North Carolina, where they were to be caretakers on a horse ranch, but settled instead on a 600-acre dairy farm in the Shenandoah Valley.
There, in addition to farm chores, Moses churned and sold up to 160 pounds of butter a week and made hand-sliced potato chips, which she traded for groceries.
Between 1888 and 1903 she had ten children, five of whom survived.
Moses continued her vigorous farm routine until, at age seventy, she finally found herself "too old for farm work and too young to retire. "
With free time at her disposal for the first time in her life, she began making woolen embroideries that she called "worsted pictures. "
With house paint and canvas left from repair of a farm machine cover, Moses began to paint.
She soon settled into a system.
Canvas was discarded in favor of more substantial Masonite, which Moses coated with three coats of flat white paint so that she wouldn't "have to put on so much expensive color paint. "
No picture was begun until a frame was ready for it and the Masonite sawed to fit.
Moses began exhibiting her pictures at a Hoosick Falls, N. Y. , drugstore in 1938 with the hope of earning a bit of extra money.
One of her first customers, who bought four paintings from the drugstore and all ten that she had on hand at the farm, was Louis J. Caldor, an engineer and antiques collector.
By chance the pictures in Caldor's collection came to the attention of Otto Kallir, a New York art dealer and recent �migr� from Vienna, who was interested in folk art.
He recognized Moses' talent at once.
In October 1940, Kallir mounted the first New York exhibition of Moses' work, calling it "What a Farmwife Painted. "
Other publications picked up the name, and eventually millions of people were unaware that she had any other.
Under Kallir's guidance a corporation was established, Grandma Moses Properties, which copyrighted her pictures, trademarked her name, and sold reproduction rights to companies such as Hallmark, which in ten years sold 35 million Grandma Moses greeting cards.
Although suddenly a celebrity at age eighty, Moses remained steadfast in her habits.
She stored her paint in empty coffee cans; her brushes, never discarded until worn to a nub, were soaked in cold cream jars.
"This way, " she explained, "your paints don't dry up on you. "
Generally she would paint the landscapes first and afterward "put in the boys and the cows. "
"I can start a batch of five on a Monday and have them finished off on a Saturday, " she said at age eighty-eight.
Kallir bought her entire output, holding back the weaker efforts and exhibiting the works he judged most successful.
Moses' innocent, sentimental, and optimistic outlook seemed quintessentially American.
Vividly rendered scenes such as Sugaring Off, Candle Dip Day, White Christmas, and Applebutter Making at the Dudley Place struck a deep chord in urban America's nostalgia for the "good old days. "
Moses was a matter-of-fact, unsentimental woman.
If she had not started painting, she said, she "would have raised chickens.
I would never sit back in a rocking chair waiting for someone to help me. "
Softening her straightforwardness was a rather sly sense of humor that crept into her paintings in amusing narrative details.
As an artist Moses was perhaps more appreciated in Europe than in America.
Reviewing a show in Paris, the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune concluded, "Though naive in the best sense of the word, she is by no means a primitive.
Her landscapes have depth, and the farawayness of distant blue mountains is beautifully conveyed.
In Shenandoah Valley the landscape is composed of varied tones, while the river is rendered as a flat sheet of blue-gray which Whistler might have envied.
. "
The Wiener Zeitung reported that, entering a Grandma Moses exhibition, "Something magical begins to happen when confronted with the originals for the first time, one is happily surprised.
What delicacy of color gradation one is amazed at the manner in which depth of a landscape is captured on the flat picture surface and by the color values of rolling hills in the blue distance.
. "
[Moses' paintings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery, Kansas City, Mo. ; the Phillips Gallery, Washington, D. C. ; the Phoenix Art Museum; and the Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vt.
See Otto Kallir, ed. , Grandma Moses: My Life's History (1952); Otto Kallir, Grandma Moses (1973); Don Wharton, "The Incredible Career of Grandma Moses, " Readers' Digest, Sept. 1967.
An obituary is in the New York Times, Dec. 14, 1961. ]
