Grandma Moses: the farm painter whose largest public collection is in Bennington
Photo: Clara Sipprell, 31 Oct 1885 - 27 Dec 1975, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses was born in 1860 in Greenwich, N.Y., a few miles from the Vermont line, and spent most of her life as a farm wife. She raised five children who survived infancy, made butter and potato chips to sell and embroidered pictures in yarn.
When arthritis made needlework too painful, she turned to painting. She was in her late 70s. Her paintings showed farm life as she remembered it: maple sugaring, haying, Thanksgiving, sleigh rides, all seen from above in bright colors.
A drugstore window
In 1938 a collector named Louis Caldor saw her paintings in a drugstore window in Hoosick Falls, N.Y., and bought them. Within two years she had a solo show in New York City, and by the 1950s she was one of the best-known artists in the country. Her images ended up on greeting cards, and she appeared on the cover of Time. She painted more than 1,500 works before her death in 1961 at 101.
The Bennington connection
Moses lived for many years in Eagle Bridge, N.Y., close to Bennington, and her ties to the area run deep. The Bennington Museum, on Main Street in Old Bennington, holds the largest public collection of her paintings in the world, along with the one-room schoolhouse she attended as a child, which was moved to the museum grounds.
Art critics were often dismissive of her work as naive, but her popularity never faded, and recent exhibitions have looked more seriously at her composition and her memory of a disappearing rural world. For many visitors to Bennington, the museum’s Grandma Moses gallery is the reason for the trip.
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