Four Paintings by Grandma Moses

They gained national popularity in the 1940s, a time when many Americans were nostalgic for the country’s pastoral past and art-world elites sought “authentic” expressions by artists without formal training. Born on a farm in upstate New York in 1860, just months before Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Moses spent much of her adult life working on farms before taking up painting as a hobby in her late 70s, when arthritis kept her from needlework. Her works are deeply personal, depicting distant memories, family anecdotes, and the rural New York community where she and her ancestors lived. We are thrilled to have recently been gifted four of her paintings, the only original works by Moses currently in the museum’s collection.

Four Newly Acquired Works

In the largest of the paintings, The Cambridge Valley, Moses presents a sweeping view of her homeland—a theme she would return to throughout her career. Using shades of greens accented with golden yellows, she depicted the lush and fertile land as a patchwork of cultivated fields dotted with small homes and barns, all nestled safely within the surrounding hills. The landscape is sparsely populated, with just a few farmers working their fields with horses and oxen-pulled carts.

Home likewise depicts a familiar and beloved subject of the artist: the Moses farm at Eagle Bridge, complete with red barns and white farmhouses connected by a branching footpath. The woman in a blue dress and white bonnet is Moses herself, joined by her then youngest grandchild.

Despite the apparent specificity of these and many of Moses’s works, her paintings typically do not record a particular location or moment with exactitude. Rather, they are places she knew, layered with memory and imagination, that evoke a time long past.

Moses created her paintings by first laying out the landscape—sky, mountains, hills, and trees—and then filling it with small set scenes of farms, houses, animals, and people. She drew upon popular pictorial sources and community lore, often using illustrations clipped from newspapers and magazines as the basis for her compositions. With Burning of the Troy Bridge, she adapted an illustration from a local newspaper commemorating an event that had taken place nearly a century earlier, adding a horse and rider, among other elements, to heighten the drama of the scene. Similarly, an illustration served as the template for Thanksgiving Turkey, in which Moses tapped into the nationwide interest in images of rural subjects and iconic US holidays, like those popularized by the printers Currier & Ives.

Moses painted “to keep busy and to pass the time away,” occasionally selling her works at local fairs, charity sales, and exchanges. She would find a much larger audience after being “discovered” at the age of 78 by Louis Caldor, a New York City amateur art collector with an interest in self-taught artists and folk art. During a visit to upstate New York in 1938, Caldor came upon several of Moses’s paintings on display at a local drugstore. He purchased as many as he could, returning to New York’s art scene enthusiastic to share the work of an unknown and untrained painter from rural America.

Caldor convinced Sidney Janis, a businessman and collector of modernist art, to include three of Moses’s works in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1939 exhibition Contemporary Unknown American Painters. He then showed her works to Otto Kallir, an art dealer who had recently opened Galerie St. Etienne, a space dedicated to authentic American folk art and paintings by untrained artists. The gallery offered Anna Mary Robertson Moses her first solo show in October of 1940, titled What a Farm Wife Painted.

Janis further solidified Moses’s place in the modern art world by featuring her work and her story in his 1942 publication, They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the Twentieth Century. Conceived of as an extension of the 1939 MoMA exhibition, its purpose was to bring greater attention to a select group of self-trained artists. A photograph in Janis’s publication shows Moses in her “studio”—a small room off the kitchen—surrounded by several of her paintings. She points to a large landscape on the wall. This is The Cambridge Valley, now in the Art Institute’s collection.

Although the exhibition of her paintings at MoMA and Galerie St. Etienne led to few sales, an invitation to Gimbels Department Store in New York City for their Thanksgiving Festival in 1940 catapulted Moses to national fame. During a personal visit to the store’s holiday displays that featured her paintings, Moses charmed audiences and the press with her story as an industrious yet modest elderly woman from the farmland. Through these events, the individual known among her community as “Mother Moses” became, in the press and to the nation, “Grandma Moses.”

Responding to Moses’s widespread appeal, Kallir developed an industry around her persona. He frequently organized exhibitions of her work while also marketing her images through affordable collectibles and home goods. Scenes from Moses’s paintings appeared upon a vast number of products, including greeting cards, fabrics, prints, and wall murals.

Although the commercialization of her work was criticized, licensing made her art available to a far greater number of people than could ever have owned an original while simultaneously increasing public awareness of Grandma Moses herself. The four paintings by Moses that recently entered our collection join several lengths of furnishing fabrics produced by Riverdale Drapery Fabrics that reproduce some of the most popular scenes from Moses’s paintings.

Additional Textiles from the Collection

The art world had lost interest in Moses by the 1950s, as artistic trends moved away from figurative and landscape narratives to more abstract responses to the modern world. Today, Grandma Moses is known almost exclusively through reproductions of her images, not her actual artwork. With the acquisition of these four original paintings, we look forward to giving visitors to the Art Institute the opportunity to experience her artistic talent and unique perspective on America’s rural past firsthand.

—Elizabeth Pope, senior research associate, Arts of the Americas and Textiles

Related Paintings from the Collection

Topics

• New Acquisition