What a Farm Wife Painted: On Grandma Moses, the Pioneer of American Primitivism
Grandma Moses, Halloween, 1955
Seventy-eight may seem like a late start. But for Grandma Moses, it was the beginning of a prolific career as an artist. Over the next twenty-three years, she traded farming for painting, producing thousands of works that brought a childhood dream to life. Born Anna Mary Robertson Moses, Grandma Moses (1860-1961) attended a one-room school in Vermont, now home to the Bennington Museum–and the largest collection of her works. It was there she began mixing lemon or grape juice with ground ocher, grass, sawdust, and flour paste to create the gentle greens, greys, and yellows that characterised her landscapes.
But life had other plans. By twelve, Moses had to begin work as a maid for a wealthy family; by twenty-seven, she was married, ready to spend the next five decades running farms alongside her husband, Thomas Salmon Moses. It was only after his death and her subsequent retirement in 1936 that she returned to the brush and began to create.
Thousands of paintings followed: autumnal landscapes, snowy wintery mornings, children skating on frozen ponds, fields being hayed, towns gathering for parades, and quilts airing on farmhouse fences. Grandma Moses displayed a particular fondness for illustrating scenes of American life. Her depictions of traditions–Christmas, Halloween, and maple-sugaring, among others–conveniently gained the most renown, becoming postcards of “old-timey” New England. Although her early works were simple and often copied from prints, they evolved into more complex compositions full of light, detail, and emotional clarity. What they lacked in perspective or anatomical precision, they made up for in warmth, directness, and what one admirer called a “light-hearted optimism.”
Such is the case for Halloween (1955). In this artwork, Moses obscured modern reality, omitting telephone poles, tractors, and other signs of industrial life, and instead distilled the scene to the core of the holiday’s emotions: joy, warmth, nostalgia, playfulness, and, of course, the thrill of mystery. But she did not let this mystery loom too long. She scattered pumpkins, people, horses, and ghosts across the composition, leaving doors and bars open so viewers could glimpse into the activities of the day. Trick-or-treaters dart across the yard, children toss pumpkins, figures in white sheets–ghosts–haunt one another, and families gather indoors and on rooftops, animated by the spirit of festivity and mischief. Each vignette is at once private and public, merging the intimacy of domestic life, which Moses knew well, with the bustle of communal festivity.
Grandma Moses, Apple Butter Making, 1947
Similar emotions penetrate Apple Butter Making (1947). Depicting yet another New England ritual, this time the act of slow-cooking and preserving the autumn apple harvest, typically done between October and November, it captures the culmination of communal effort. As people pick apples on the right-hand side of the composition, others gather near the great copper kettle at the center, tending the simmering fruit with long paddles. Around them, children play, women carry baskets, and male figures chat in the shade of the trees. The open landscape, with its gentle slope toward the river and clear autumn sky, does not necessarily appear realistic; rather, it maintains Grandma Moses’ identity as a primitivist painter and banks on emotional resonance. And it does it successfully. Pulled by vision, imagination, and memory, the viewer can almost step into the scene, looking over the villagers from an elevated vantage point, feeling the crisp air against their skin, and breathing in the mingling scents of caramelising apples, woodsmoke, and pine. They become privy to a shared rhythm of labor and leisure, invited not only to witness but to join the scene and partake in the enduring spirit of American life—its traditions, practices, and joys. Through scenes like these, Grandma Moses commemorated her own life and that of her contemporaries, memorialising the most moving, resonant, and picturesque aspects of rural America. Her paintings serve not only as a preservation of vernacular knowledge but also as emblems of New England identity, continuously shaping how we remember and imagine a simpler, communal past.
But the story does not end there. Moses’s celebration of everyday life and tradition exposes a larger narrative about women’s creative expression–and their artistic evolution beyond the studios of formal art institutions. Her amateur training, for example, links her to other women painters who emerged from the amateur tradition: Plautilla Nelli, who taught herself to paint by copying other artists, and miniature painters Bianca Boni and Enrichetta Fioroni Narducci Koelmann, who learned their craft within the home. To a lesser extent, she may also be connected to Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, artists who began within the amateur tradition but ultimately surpassed it through their proximity to established male figures such as Manet and Degas. Unlike them, however, Moses had no formal training, no access to salons, and no exposure to European academies. Rather than a private professional, as was the case for them, Moses remained a public amateur, her artistic expression stemming from instinct and experience rather than rigorous training and study of precedent and technique.
But neither this nor her late start slowed her rise. When her first solo show, What a Farm Wife Painted, opened in 1940, her work moved from the windows of small-town drugstores to department stores in New York and onto the walls of major galleries. Over the next two decades, her paintings toured across America and Europe, breaking attendance records and transforming her into a sought-after artist, celebrated by collectors and presidents alike for the primitive freshness of her work and its pioneering vision of American life.
And that—the autodidactism, the volumes of work, the sales, the success—all boils down to one thing: attitude. As Grandma Moses reflected in her autobiography, "I look back on my life like a good day's work, it was done and I feel satisfied with it. I was happy and contented, I knew nothing better and made the best out of what life offered. And life is what we make it, always has been, always will be."
Grandma Moses, circa 1950. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Katie Louchheim