“Life is
what we make it, always has been, always will be.”
As a little girl, Anna Mary
Robertson Moses squeezed lemons and grapes to get ‘colors’ to paint her paper
dolls. She also used sawdust, flour paste, and grass to create what she called
her “lamb-scapes.”
He father was supportive, but her
mother was more practical, telling her she should “spend [her] time other
ways.”
Her mother was right. She did have
to be more practical. She had to be. Born in 1860 in Greenwich, New York, she
was the third of five daughters and five sons. She only briefly attended a
one-room school house. She left school—and her home—when she was 12 to do
housework for a family that was better off.
She met her future husband in
Staunton, Virginia, when they were both working on the same farm. They married
when she was 27, and they settled in the Shenandoah Valley and had 10 children,
only five of whom survived infancy. She helped support her family by churning
butter. Being frugal, they were able to scrimp and save enough to buy their own
farm.
After 40 years of marriage, her
husband died of a heart attack in 1927 at the age of 67. Moses continued to run
her family farm with the help of her children. But in 1936 she retired. That's
when her family started calling her “Grandma Moses.”
She had made quilts and embroidered
country scenes all her life, but she finally had to stop around that time due
to arthritis in her fingers. Her daughter suggested she take up painting again.
Prancing
Ponies
“I couldn’t stand the thought of
being idle,” she said. At first, she copied images from postcards, then as she
got more practice, she found the courage to imagine her own scenes. They were always idyllic visions of rural
and farm life in Virginia and New England—harvests, country weddings, maple sap
being boiled into syrup, steam-engine trains barreling down the line, prancing
ponies harnessed to carriages, and townsfolk dutifully going about their
business.
She first exhibited her paintings at
a county fair near in Eagle Bridge, New York. (She was now living with her
youngest son.) She sent them along with her strawberry preserves and raspberry
jam which she had entered in a competition. The jam won a pretty ribbon. Fairgoers
ignored her art.
“I’ll 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,” she said.
She created visions of an unspoiled,
joyous, idyllic rural New England. “A strange thing is memory, and hope: One
looks backward and the other forward. One is of today, the other of tomorrow,"
she said. "Memory is history recorded in our brain. Memory is a painter. It
paints pictures of the past and of the day."
The truth is slightly more
complicated. Like modern artists of the time like Andy Warhol, she had volumes
of what she called “art secrets”—photographs, children’s books, and magazine
ads that she copied and traced to help her along.
She had no formal training as an
artist, and perspective in her paintings is flattened with backgrounds and
foregrounds all seemingly mostly one-dimensional.
“I paint from the top down,” she
said. “From the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then
the cattle, and then the people.”
In all her work, one senses joy and
wonderment at the world. “I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of
the shadows and the different greens in the trees," she said, "But
when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene."
Hoping to pick up a few dollars, she
allowed some of her paintings to be displayed in the front window of the drug
store in nearby Hoosick Falls, New York. An art collector passing through spotted
them. All were priced between $3 and $5, and they had all been gathering dust
for years. Sensing something special in her work, he bought them all.
Upon returning to Manhattan, he took
them to prominent galleries. A year later her work appeared in Museum of Modern
Art show of “contemporary unknown painters.” Her work was exhibited with her
name and the label “Housewife. New York.” She nearly 80.
She became a sensation. She was an
elfin charmer, just slightly over five feet tall. "Like a lively
sparrow" is how Norman Rockwell described her. She had a merry gleam in
her eyes and wore wearing tiny black hats and demure dresses with fine white
lace collars.
Lipstick
to coffee
Her work appeared on Christmas cards—an
estimated 48 million Hallmark cards, and she licensed her paintings to sell everything
from lipstick to coffee, wallpaper, draperies, china, and even cigarettes.
President Truman invited her to the
White House in 1949 and played the piano for her. She appeared on the cover of
Time Magazine in 1953.
Norman Rockwell lived a few miles
away across the river in Vermont. They became friends, and he even included her
in one of his paintings—"The Homecoming" which was published on the
cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1949. "Grandma Moses is the cleanest
woman I have ever seen," he said. "Her skin is clear as a young
girl's."
When Rockwell asked to see her
studio, she teased him, saying that no proper gentleman would ask to visit a
lady's bedroom. She granted him admittance, and he was shocked to find that
that she imbibed black coffee "incessantly" while painting.
He sketched her while she was at
work. Later, when the drawing was published, she was upset to see that he
included her coffee pot in the picture. She didn't want people to know she was
a coffee drinker.
She became wealthy, earning an
estimated $500,000 a year from licensing and selling her originals for nearly
$10,000 apiece. (In 2006, her painting “Sugaring Off” sold for $1.2 million.)
Even though her paintings sold for
thousands, Rockwell observed that she used "the same cheap brushes and
house paint" she used before she was famous.
She remained humble, never getting
above her ‘raisings.’
“If I hadn’t started painting I
would have raised chickens,” she once said, adding that “If you know something
well, you can always paint it, but people would be better off buying chickens.”
She died at age 101 in 1961. Her
doctor said she just “wore out.” President Kennedy eulogized her, saying “Both
her work and her life helped our nation renew its pioneer heritage and recall
its roots in the countryside and on the frontier.”
“I painted for pleasure," she
said. "To keep busy and to pass the time away, but I thought no more of it
than of doing fancy work.”
“I
look back on my life like a good day’s work," she said. "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.”
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