The Old-Timey One

The paintings on display in the drugstore window in the town of Hoosick Falls, N.Y., were as bright as a calico dress, gay as an old-fashioned quilt--bustling scenes of country folk doing everyday chores. The artist was obviously untrained, but to Manhattan Collector Louis Caldor, who spotted them and bought them for an average of $4 each, they had a kind of magic. Who had painted them? An old lady of 78, Caldor was told, who lived down on Cambridge Road. She was Anna Mary Robertson Moses, and from that moment until she slipped quietly into death last week at the age of 101, Grandma Moses was almost the most famous painter in the U.S.

She was born in little (pop. about 2.000) Greenwich, N.Y., one of a family of ten. She never went beyond the "sixth reader" in school; instead, at the age of twelve, she left home to become a hired girl. It was, she later recalled with her unshatterable cheeriness, "a grand education for me in cooking, housekeeping, in moralizing and mingling with the outside world." One day, when she was 26. she met a tall, blue-eyed Hoosick Falls hired man named Tom Moses. "Howda," she said, and with that her courtship began.

Everyone's Grandma. The young couple tried farming in Virginia, then moved back to Eagle Bridge, N.Y. By the time Tom died in 1927, they had had ten children, only five of whom survived. In time there were grandchildren and then greatgrandchildren. To everyone who knew her, Anna was Grandma Moses.

It was not until she was 76, when her arthritic hands could no longer hold an embroidery needle, that she started painting--just for something to do after the housework. When asked what artist of the past she admired, she said. "I've always liked Currier & Ives." Her paintings had the same nostalgic naivete; they were, as she put it, "Old-Timey." Sometimes she would do four paintings at a time to save paint ("I do the blue for one sky and then the three other skies"), and following her own rules, she always worked from the top down, filling in the fields and farmhouses, the toylike trees and stubby little figures simply by instinct. Before long, she was big business, with her affairs being handled in Manhattan by Otto Kallir. director of the St. Etienne Gallery. Her canvases fetched as much as $10,000 and wherever she went, people asked her for her "monogram."

In a Shadowless World. At her best. Grandma Moses was no ordinary primitive. She had in her mind a shadowless world of dancing images, and these she put down on Masonite, placed flat upon her kitchen table, with a freshness of vision that seemed eternally young. She worked too rapidly, often too carelessly, for excellence; but this very spontaneity was part of her appeal.

She became in her lifetime a national institution, a witty, doughty little lady who seemed to recall something about America that America missed. She painted from memory, but her memory never told her of sickness, poverty or death. It sang of warmhearted, no-nonsense people who had much too much to do to indulge in the luxury of despair. Her pictures were a tonic to the nation. Once she was asked what she thought she had to show for all her work. "I've helped some people," she said, and so, in her way, she had.

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