Grandma Moses

Grandma Moses (1860–1961), Haying Time, 1944
Oil on pressed wood, 23 1/4 × 29 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. 2024.61. © Grandma Moses Properties Co., NY. Photography by Edward C. Robison III.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses became a celebrity known as “Grandma Moses” in the last decades of her century-long life. She started painting with no formal training at age 77, usually depicting the farm life of her childhood in upstate New York. These scenes of rural America resonated with twentieth-century viewers nostalgic for an idealized past. As Moses wrote in her autobiography, “I look back on my life like a good day’s work.”