Grandma Moses: Started painting in her seventies, first solo show at 80
Anna Mary Robertson Moses worked as a hired girl from childhood and as a farm wife for decades. When arthritis stopped her embroidery she took up painting, and was first shown in New York at 80.
A hired girl at 12
Anna Mary Robertson was born in 1860 in upstate New York. From about the age of 12 she lived and worked as a hired girl on nearby farms, cooking, cleaning and sewing. She married Thomas Moses in 1887 and farmed with him in Virginia and then New York.
From needle to brush
Widowed and in her seventies, she made pictures in embroidery until arthritis made the needle too hard to hold. By the mid 1930s she had turned to painting farm scenes from memory instead.
A drugstore window
Her paintings sat for sale in a drugstore window in Hoosick Falls, New York. In 1938 a collector from New York City, Louis Caldor, saw them, bought them and took them to dealers in the city.
What came of it
In 1940, aged 80, she had her first solo exhibition at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York. She painted well over a thousand pictures and worked until shortly before her death in 1961, aged 101.
When one kind of work became impossible, she found another way to use the same skills. Changing how you work is not the same as stopping.
Where the facts come from: Smithsonian American Women's History Museum, 'Grandma Moses' Folk Art Took Her from the Farm to Fame'; Bennington Museum, Grandma Moses collection.
