Never Too Late

In the window of a small chemist's shop in the town of Hoosick Falls, New York, a few paintings were propped up for sale. They showed farms, snowy hills, horses pulling sleighs, and tiny people gathering apples and making maple syrup.

The prices were low. Nobody seemed in a hurry to buy them. They had been painted by an old farm widow from a nearby village, who was nearly eighty years old.

One day in 1938, a man from New York City walked past that window and stopped.

A farm girl

Anna Mary Robertson was born in 1860 in upstate New York, one of ten children in a farming family. As a little girl she loved to draw and colour pictures, using whatever she could find, and she is said to have used the juice of fruit and berries as paint.

But there was little time for pictures on a farm. At twelve she left home to work as a hired girl for a neighbouring family, cooking, cleaning and sewing. She did this kind of work for years.

In 1887 she married a farm worker named Thomas Moses. They moved to Virginia, where they rented and later bought farms, and worked hard. Anna Mary churned butter and made potato chips to sell. Together they raised five children.

A lifetime of work

In 1905 the family moved back north, to a farm at Eagle Bridge, New York, not far from where Anna Mary had grown up. Life went on in the rhythm of the seasons: planting and harvest, making soap and candles, boiling sap into maple syrup in the spring.

In 1927 her husband Thomas died. Anna Mary was in her late sixties. Her son and his wife took over much of the farming, and for the first time in her life, she had a little time to herself.

She filled it with embroidery, stitching pictures in wool. But as she grew older, arthritis made her hands stiff and sore, and the needle became hard to hold. Her sister suggested that she try painting instead. A brush, she thought, might be easier on her hands.

So, in her late seventies, Anna Mary Moses started to paint.

Painting from memory

She had no training. She painted on old boards and pieces of canvas, sometimes using house paint. She painted on a table in her bedroom, not at an easel.

Her pictures came from memory. She painted the world of her childhood: the farms of the 1860s and 1870s, the first snow, the county fair, the Fourth of July, children skating on a pond, families bringing in the turkey for Thanksgiving. She usually started with the sky, then the hills, and lastly the people, tiny and busy, doing all the jobs of country life.

She gave her paintings away, or sold them for a few dollars, and some went to the chemist's shop in Hoosick Falls.

Discovered

The man who stopped at that shop window was an art collector named Louis Caldor. He bought the paintings in the window and then drove to Eagle Bridge to find the artist and buy more.

He spent months trying to interest galleries in New York. Many were not keen. Who wanted to promote a painter who was almost eighty? Surely there would not be enough time for her to paint very much more.

They were wrong. In 1939 some of her paintings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in an exhibition of unknown American artists. In 1940 a gallery owner named Otto Kallir gave her her first solo exhibition, and the newspapers began calling her Grandma Moses.

People loved her pictures. They looked like memories of a gentler time, full of snow, light and neighbours working together.

A second life

Grandma Moses kept painting for more than twenty years. Her pictures were printed on Christmas cards and shown in museums in America and Europe. She met President Truman, who gave her an award in 1949. She was interviewed on television. In 1952 she published the story of her life.

Through all this fame, she kept living in Eagle Bridge, getting up early, and painting at her table. She did not think of herself as anyone special. She simply enjoyed the work and liked to keep busy.

She painted well over a thousand pictures, and she was still painting after her hundredth birthday. Anna Mary Robertson Moses died in December 1961 at the age of 101.

A woman who had spent most of her life scrubbing, cooking, sewing and farming showed the world that a life's best work can begin very late indeed.

Want to read more?

Grandma Moses told her own story in My Life's History (1952), in a plain and cheerful voice. Jane Kallir's Grandma Moses: The Artist Behind the Myth is a careful, illustrated account of her life and art. Many of her paintings can be seen in American museums and in books of her work.