Open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through October 26
Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961) created a landscape of the imagination for the modern era while stirring feelings of nostalgia for decades past. Popularly called “Grandma Moses,” she was often marginalized by critics as a “folk” painter or a phenomenon marketed toward popular consumer culture. By the 1950s—and when Moses was in her 90’s—she achieved a dominant position in American visual culture as an artist who effectively responded to the hopes and challenges of her day. Her iconic paintings capture a return to simpler lifestyles, depicting picturesque landscapes of quaint villages and lively townspeople, which echoed the popular sentiment of the mid-20th century and, in many respects, today.
The myth of Moses, as an artist trapped in amber from an earlier time and in opposition to her midcentury artist contemporaries, since has been dismissed. One such project that revealed Moses as a truly modern artist, with motivations and influences as complicated as any of her peers, was the past exhibition and associated catalogue Grandma Moses: American Modern (2016-2017). These two notable projects were organized and presented by Bennington Museum and Shelburne Museum—two institutions that hold special ties with the artist. Painting at Home with Grandma Moses marks a return to our institutions’ collaboration and celebration of Moses and her work. This online exhibition highlights the artist’s methodical artistic process and varying sources of inspiration that reveal Moses as a complex, thoughtful, and thoroughly modern artist.
Painting at Home with Grandma Moses is collaborative project by Shelburne Museum and Bennington Museum in partnership with Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York.
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by The Donna and Marvin Schwartz Foundation and the Barnstormers at Shelburne Museum.
Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses (American, 1860-1961)
Old Home, 1957
Oil on Masonite, 11 1/4 x 15 1/4 in.
Collection of Shelburne Museum, gift of Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, 1957-697
Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York
[wpm-expand intro="Shelburne Museum founder Electra Havemeyer Webb and “Grandma” Moses became acquainted in the late 1950s" content="and they quickly developed a warm personal relationship. Mrs. Webb repeatedly hosted the artist at her Vermont home and organized a solo exhibition of Moses’s work at the museum in 1960. Today, there are seven paintings by Moses in the museum’s permanent collection, including this one.
As a symbol of their burgeoning friendship and admiration for one another, Moses sent the collector this delightful painting in 1957. A small, Federal-style house presents a symmetrical vision of domestic order in an idyllic winter landscape. Painted white, the house recedes into the snowy scene and anchors a composition including a church, school, and mill—building types easily read as representing religion, learning, and commerce. Far off hills bisect the composition and Moses’ application of glitter into the pigment activates the painting, creating a shimmering, festive effect all the more appropriate in light of the inscription, “To my dear friend, Electra Havemeyer Webb, Merry Christmas, 1957.”" /]
Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses (American, 1860-1961)
Bennington, 1953
Oil on pressed board, 17 3/4 x 24 in.
Collection of Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, museum purchase, 1986.347
Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York
[wpm-expand intro="By virtue of living mere miles from the Vermont state border, Vermont held special meaning to Moses, in particular," content="the town of Bennington. While Moses lived in Bennington between 1932 and 1935—caring for her ill daughter, Anna, and her two granddaughters, Frances and Zoeanne—her professional relationship with Bennington Museum came two years after her death in 1961. In 1963, Otto Kallir, and his gallery Galerie St. Etienne, presented the first of several special exhibitions at the museum. In the years subsequent, the museum opened a more permanent temporary Moses exhibition space, called the “Grandma Moses Gallery” and today holds the largest public collection of Moses paintings.
Painted ten years before her first exhibition at the museum, Moses created this painting, Bennington, which prominently features the distinctive U-shaped Bennington Museum building, gray with white columns, as it looked in 1937. Notable for its conspicuous spatial and temporal disjunctions, this painting also includes horse-drawn vehicles in the foreground, which would have been replaced by motorized vehicles long before then. Immediately to the right of the museum, Moses painted a needle-like version of the Bennington Battle Monument, which is located a half mile to the northwest." /]
Attributed to John Whiteside (South Cambridge, New York, 1752-1841)
Painted by Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses (American, 1860-1961)
"Tip-up" Table, built ca. 1773, painted ca. 1920
Painted wood with magazine collage, 27 x 45 x 31 1⁄2 in.
Collection of Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, museum purchase, 1984.516
Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York
[wpm-expand intro="Moses did not follow a standard set of guidelines in determining what objects could present themselves as canvases for" content="new paintings. Instead, she painted on a variety of objects, including the base of a tilt-top table that had been passed down in her family since the 18th century, and served as her improvised easel.
Moses painted the box-like base of this antique table in fertile, lively landscapes featuring rivers, pastures, and mill scenes. The table is also one of the only known examples of Moses utilizing direct collage, wherein she applied cut source material—such as images from magazines—and built them into her painting, often by painting over them. Moses would later develop a technique of copying source material to collage into her paintings by tracing over carbon paper onto her primed surfaces." /]
Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses (American, 1860-1961)
Covered Bridge with Carriage or Black Buggy, 1946
Oil on Masonite, 29 x 22 3/8 in.
Collection of Shelburne Museum, museum purchase, acquired from Otto Kallir, 1961-210.3
Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York
[wpm-expand intro="Moses developed a tried-and-true methodology for preparing her iconic paintings. She would begin by selecting a frame," content="which she would sometimes have to repair, but knew would be most effective if it blended into the painting and did not compete with the image. Moses would then cut a piece of Masonite board or hardwood to fit her frame, and prime it as her canvas. In her memoir, Grandma Moses: My Life’s History, Moses recounted: “I go over the board with linseed oil, then with three coats of flat white paint to cover up the darkness of the board. ...Now the board is ready for the scene, whatever the mind may produce, a landscape, an old bridge, a dream, or a summer or winter scene, childhood memories, but always something pleasing and cheerful, I like bright colors and activity.”
While Moses generally preferred to create horizontally-oriented compositions, this work is a rare example of a vertical picture and is representative of Moses’ mature landscape style. Although she was often pestered by clients for this upright format—because it was better suited to publication in magazines—the artist seldom produced them. In the tones of the distant mountains, the artist has created a sense of vastness that both complements and contrasts with the intimacy of the horse-drawn carriage and the covered bridge." /]
Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses (American, 1860-1961)
Cambridge, 1944
Oil on Masonite, 20 1/4 x 24 3/8 in.
Collection of Shelburne Museum, museum purchase, acquired from Otto Kallir, 1961-210.1
Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York
[wpm-expand intro="Moses’s landscapes often present an imagined pictorial space, depth, and perspective. Flat fields of colors are stacked" content="on top of one another and the scale of objects and nature in relation and distance to one another are often inexact. The worlds Moses creates are, however, instantly recognizable and effectively capture the expressive landscapes. She was an astute observer of nature, and she incorporated her careful studies of the delicate, atmospheric transitions of color into her works.
Moses detailed, “When I paint, I study and study the outside lots of times. Often I get at (a) loss to know just what shade of green, and there are a hundred trees that have each three or four shades of green in them. I look at a tree and I see the limbs, and then the next part of the tree is a dark, dark black green, then I have got to make a little lighter green, and so on.”
In Cambridge, Moses uses different shades of green to differentiate the varying pictorial space of the foreground, middle ground, and background. She further leads the eye through the landscape, creating a break in the stone wall at the foreground and providing a narrative path—literally a winding road—into the distant mountains."/]
Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses (American, 1860-1961)
The Mailman Has Gone, 1949
Oil on Masonite, 16 3/8 x 21 in.
Collection of Shelburne Museum, museum purchase, acquired from Otto Kallir, 1961-210.4
Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York
[wpm-expand intro="While Moses takes inspiration from the life, towns, and land she knew, her paintings are not literal depictions of a" content="certain place. Instead, Moses draws upon recalled memories when she creates her works of art. Her mind was occupied by nostalgia for yesteryear—wholesome events and life moments—but she felt little obligation to record “facts” in the traditional sense of the word in her paintings, freely drawing on the limitless possibilities of the imagination, “I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees,” Moses recalled in her memoir, “But when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.”
The subjects Moses would evoke were almost always based on personal experience and recollections. The artist frowned upon depicting subjects with which she didn’t have a personal familiarity, writing to Otto Kallir, her dealer, “Someone has asked me to paint biblical pictures, and I say ‘no.’ I’ll not paint something that we know nothing about, might just as well paint something that will happen two thousand years hence.”" /]
Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses (American, 1860-1961)
The Battle of Bennington, 1953
Oil on pressed board, 18 x 30 in.
Collection of Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, gift of Carol and Arnold Haynes, 2004.40
Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York
[wpm-expand intro="Moses not only drew upon her own memories during her creative process, but she also pulled from historic events or" content="stories, relying on creative expression to color her recounting of yesteryear.
One such example is Moses’s The Battle at Bennington, painted in 1953, which depicts the historic Revolutionary War battle of August 16, 1777. Moses presents the historical battle as a contemporary event, boldly including the monument built to commemorate the battle over one hundred years later in the upper right-hand corner of the painting.
The Daughters of the American Revolution commissioned Moses to paint this work, but rejected this first version for perceived historical inaccuracies. While Moses was deeply interested in the past, her historical images tended to rely more on hearsay, memory, and personal association than well-documented historical fact. Some of the figural groups are instead based on secondary source images or paintings Moses discovered while researching the project." /]
Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses (American, 1860-1961)
After the Wedding, 1942
Oil on Masonite, 17 3/4 x 30 1/4 in.
Collection of Shelburne Museum, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Peter F. Carleton in memory of Mrs. P.H.B. Frelinghuysen, 1965-59.1
Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York
[wpm-expand intro="When Moses found a figure—or in this case a building—that she particularly liked, she would reuse it in multiple" content="paintings.
The red-and-white checkered building in these two paintings, with its eye-catching pattern, was a local landmark in Cambridge, New York. Although the Checkered Inn burned in 1907, Moses painted the structure from memory many times over the course of her career, and After the Wedding is the earliest known version. The bride can be seen seated in the large red and black buggy on the left, probably on the way to her wedding reception. The three horse-drawn carriages, all pictured in motion, make for a striking ensemble, appropriate for the energy and excitement of a wedding.
Moses recalled horse races that were held on the turnpike that ran in front of the house. Over the course of her career, Moses painted many iterations of this subject, often appending what seem to be arbitrary dates to the end of the title. These dates seem to suggest something that is “old-timey,” as Moses might have said, rather than recording any significant historic event." /]
Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses (American, 1860-1961)
Bennington, 1945
Oil on pressed board, 17 3/4 x 26 in.
Collection of Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, museum purchase, 1986.310
Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York
[wpm-expand intro="Drawing inspiration from commercially produced images, such as the postcard of downtown Bennington, was standard" content="practice for many 20th-century artists. Moses was likewise constantly incorporating preexisting imagery into her paintings.
A postcard featuring a panoramic fish-eye photo of prominent buildings in Bennington’s commercial center serves as the compositional spine for Moses’s Bennington of 1945. Although the buildings are heavily distorted by the fish-eye effect of the photograph, Moses nonetheless transferred the image quite directly to her painting, even partially maintaining the postcard’s grisaille, or grey-toned, color scheme. She improvised the rest of the scene, drawing heavily on other unidentified sources, making it difficult to identify as Bennington except for a few potentially familiar landmark structures, such as the Old First Church and the Battle Monument, the two white spires right of center in the mid-ground. Like most of Moses’ work, Bennington combines bits of recorded reality with the artist’s memories and unique artistic voice to create an image more powerful than a mere statement of visual facts or a literal reproduction." /]
Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses (American, 1860-1961)
The Old House at the Bend of the Road, ca. 1940
Oil on canvas, 10 3/4 x 12 1/2 in.
Collection of Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, gift of Sylvia Partridge, 1995.13
Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York
[wpm-expand intro="Throughout her career, Moses rarely let it be known that she would borrow or re-appropriate popular, commercially" content="printed imagery into her works of art. However, The Old House at the Bend of the Road is based on a beloved Currier & Ives lithograph, American Homestead – Summer, which was originally printed in 1869. While Moses made adjustments to color and the substitution or addition of a new figure or tree, her main source of inspiration is clear. Moses originally collaged two cows into the right foreground of The Old House at the Bend of the Road, but decided to remove them before finishing the painting—you can still see their “ghosts” if you look carefully. While she rarely collaged images directly onto her paintings, Moses frequently made use of clipped images from newspapers, magazines, and greeting cards that she would trace as one step in the process of creating her own unique compositions. She became highly adept at incorporating various aspects of a print source and combining them with her own memories and imagination to create images that were distinctively her own." /]