Artist:
Anna Mary Robertson ("Grandma") Moses
(1860 - 1961)
Sugaring Off, Maple
Medium: Oil on pressed wood
Date: 1943
Dimensions:
19 7/8 × 23 15/16 in. (50.5 × 60.8 cm)
Accession number: 2018.6
Copyright: Copyright © 1973 (renewed 2001), Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York.
Label Copy:
Anna Mary Robertson Moses, better known as “Grandma Moses,” was well into her seventies when she turned her hobby of painting into a serious career. The popular appeal of her paintings is due, in part, to their nostalgic subject matter and the perception that they represented an “authentic” American vision, free of the influence of European art. As a completely self-taught artist, she trained her eye, practiced drawing and painting to suit her own aesthetic, and won acclaim for subjects that reflected her daily life. Her scenes of maple sugaring, apple-butter making, quilting bees, and other rural subjects emphasized family and community.
Research Number: Kallir, 219
Curatorial RemarksAnna Mary Robertson Moses, better known as “Grandma Moses,” achieved the kind of name recognition in the United States usually reserved for such artists as Picasso and Rembrandt. Well into her seventies when she began to take her hobby of painting more seriously, Moses’s work was discovered by a collector, who brought her paintings to the attention of New York galleries and dealers in 1938. The following year, her work was included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Unknown Contemporary Painters and, in 1940, she found gallery representation with her first solo show in New York, What a Farm Wife Painted.
The popular appeal of her paintings is due, in part, to their nostalgic subject matter and the perception that they represented an “authentic” American vision, unencumbered by the schools and styles of Europe. As a completely self-taught artist, she trained her own eye, practiced drawing and painting to suit her own aesthetic, and won acclaim for subjects that reflected her daily life growing up in the nineteenth century. Her scenes of maple sugaring, apple butter making, quilting bees, and other subjects emphasized family and community at a time when the mainstream art world was lauding abstraction and avant-garde approaches to painting
The popular appeal of her paintings is due, in part, to their nostalgic subject matter and the perception that they represented an “authentic” American vision, unencumbered by the schools and styles of Europe. As a completely self-taught artist, she trained her own eye, practiced drawing and painting to suit her own aesthetic, and won acclaim for subjects that reflected her daily life growing up in the nineteenth century. Her scenes of maple sugaring, apple butter making, quilting bees, and other subjects emphasized family and community at a time when the mainstream art world was lauding abstraction and avant-garde approaches to painting