GRANDMA MOSES - Sugaring Off

It's the ideal time of the year to learn about the folk artist, Anna Mary Robertson Moses, a/k/a Grandma Moses (1860-1961). 

My knowledge about Grandma Moses is nil....til this post.  I start with the fact that she started painting when she was 78.  (Good lesson for us that it's never too late to start doing something we're interested in.)   In the 1950s, she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, her autobiography My Life's History was published in 1952.  She was awarded two honorary doctoral degrees.

When Moses first started showing her works, she was known as Mrs. Moses. In 1940, an art critic noted in a 1940 New York Herald Tribune review that her neighbors called her Grandma Moses, and the name stayed with her.  

While working as a live-in housekeeper starting at age 12, her employers noticed her appreciation for their Currier and Ives prints.  They bought her chalk and wax crayons.  Moses and her husband had ten children, five who survived.  She embroidered pictures with yarn, until her hands were disabled with arthritis.

In her 1961 obituary (she was 101), The New York Times wrote of her:  "The simple realism, nostalgic atmosphere and luminous color with which Grandma Moses portrayed simple farm life and rural countryside won her a wide following.  She was able to capture the excitement of winter's first snow, Thanksgiving preparations and the new, young green of oncoming spring.....In person, Grandma Moses charmed wherever she went.  A tiny, lively woman with mischievous gray eyes and a quick wit, she could be sharp-tongued with a sycophant and stern with an errant grandchild."

Sugaring Off was one of Grandma Moses' most popular paintings.  Her inspiration for it was a well-known Currier & Ives lithograph.  She sometimes copied compositions, but she never tried to duplicate this Currier & Ives print.  She freely combined elements from her primary source with vignettes from other sources and from her own imagination.  Take a special note in the bottom left the mother pouring maple syrup on the snow, where it would harden into instant candy, the men with buckets, and the little sugar house.  The painting was produced on Hallmark Christmas cards.  This is what made Grandma Moses wealthy.  Her net worth was between $1.5 and $5 million.

Sugaring Off 

The painting depicts the artist's interpretation of the maple syrup season...the process of boiling sap to create maple syrup.  Each of the characters has a special role in this bustling scene.  This painting was so popular that it was featured on a commemorative postage stamp by the United States Postal Service in 1969. Sugaring Off is currently displayed in the Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont. 

• Grandma Moses was named "Young Woman of the Year" at age 88.
• She was friends with Norman Rockwell.
• One of her paintings, July Fourth, hangs in the White House.
• She produced around 2,000 paintings.

When she died, President Kennedy issued the following statement:  "The death of Grandma Moses removes a beloved figure from American life.  The directness and vividness of her paintings restored a primitive freshness to our perception of the American scene.  All Americans mourn her loss.  Both her work and her life helped our nation renew its pioneer heritage and recalled its roots in the countryside and on the frontier."

Here are a few quotes from Grandma Moses......

• "If I hadn't started painting, I would have raised chickens."
• "Painting's not important. The important thing is keeping busy."
• "Life is what we make it.  Always has been, always will be."
• "I look back on my life like a good day's work.  It was done and I am satisfied with it."
• "When I get ready to paint, I just close my eyes and imagine a scene."
• "There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person.  They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them.  You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them."