Grandma Moses and Mt. Airy, the Virginia house that joined the National Register in 2012

Anna Mary Robertson Moses, "Grandma Moses," was a sprightly American folk painter whose work became popular in the middle of the twentieth century. A park ranger at James A. Garfield National Historic Site wrote this piece in March 2015 to close Women's History Month, in a series on forgotten women.

From arthritis to a household name

The nickname was her own, taken once she had grandchildren. She had dabbled in art briefly before her husband Thomas died. She turned to painting for good when her hands became too arthritic for other work and her sister suggested it. A statement often quoted from her says that if she had not taken up painting she would have raised chickens, meaning painting was just something to occupy her. She gave pictures away or sold them to local stores as decor for $5.

By the end of her career she had made over 1,000 paintings and become a household name, with her work reproduced on products such as tiles, dishes and fabrics. She received the Women's National Press Club Trophy from President Harry Truman, and became what the article calls an American phenomenon.

Her pictures were mostly memories of her childhood and married life, the years she valued most: wide landscapes with many figures in the foreground, often doing a farm task she had done or seen. Art critics often wrote about her work with disdain, but the public wanted more. In a time of fear of atomic bombs and lingering memories of the Great Depression, she showed a life many Americans wanted to identify with. Her work stood in sharp contrast to the then-current movement of Cubism, popularized by Pablo Picasso, yet it had a note of modernity in its flat figures, which grew more abstract as her work progressed.

Mt. Airy

Anna Mary Robertson Moses died in 1961. In August 2012, Mt. Airy, her home in Augusta County, Virginia, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Shenandoah house was first built around 1840 under the ownership of Major James Crawford and later became associated with Anna and Thomas Moses. It was the first house they owned: they bought it for $6,000 and lived there from January 1901 to September 1902. She began making pictures in the 1930s from her memories as a farm wife, in Virginia and in New York's Hoosick Valley, and it is thought that many of them showed life at Mt. Airy.

Mt. Airy, in Augusta County, Virginia, was Grandma Moses's home for a short period in the early 1900s and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012 (National Park Service).

Sources

• National Park Service, James A. Garfield National Historic Site, "Finding History's Forgotten Women with the National Register of Historic Places, Part II", by a park ranger at the site, written in March 2015 for the Garfield Observer, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/finding-history-s-forgotten-women-with-the-national-register-of-historic-places-part-ii.htm; the portrait and two paintings, credited to other websites, are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.