Art: Grandma Moses

Eagle Bridge, N. Y. (pop. 300) nestles on the hard western slope of Vermont’s Green Mountains just where they roll over the New York border. There 13 years ago Farmer Thomas Solomon Moses died, left the care of his 180-acre farm entirely to his widow. For frail Anna Mary Robertson Moses, running the farm was pretty hard work. Soon she found she had to rest her back. To occupy her busy fingers, Anna Moses (80) decided to take up painting.

She ordered a set of paints from Sears, Roebuck, got herself some old planks, sheets of tin and pieces of threshing canvas to paint on. Then she started to make pictures of the hilly country around Eagle Bridge. Most of her pictures showed scenes and events of farm life: boiling maple sap on the winter snow, rounding up the turkey for Thanksgiving, covered bridges, Model T Fords, bonfires. Her picture frames she took from old mirrors in the attic. Once she attempted an allegory: a picture of an angel saving two children from falling over a cliff. She labeled it “The Gardin Angle” (Guardian Angel).

Folks around Eagle Bridge never paid much attention to Grandma Moses’ paintings. But one day a Manhattan inventor of a streamlined percolator named Louis Caldor happened to pass through Eagle Bridge, got a stomachache and entered the local country drugstore to buy some pills. There Inventor Caldor, who was also an art lover, saw one of Mrs. Moses’ pictures standing on a counter, asked who painted it, went to see her. When he offered to pay good money for four of her pictures, Anna Moses was surprised. She was still more surprised when, two years later, Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art exhibited three of them, and sober Manhattan critics called her an “authentic American primitive.”

Last week, at Manhattan’s new little Galerie St. Etienne, Anna Moses had her first one-man show. It consisted of 35-odd paintings, nearly her whole output, still primly mounted in the old looking-glass frames from the Moses attic. Sophisticated Manhattan gallery-goers were charmed by her carefully stippled flower beds, speckled snowstorms, shutter-green mountains. Again Manhattan critics raved: “A challenge to scores of more sophisticated painters,” compared her canvases to those of famed German exile George Grosz.

Slim, grey-haired Anna Moses was invited to Manhattan to see her show. But Anna Moses was too busy tending her farm, painting more pictures on her front porch at Eagle Bridge. Wrote she: “As this is Monday morning on the farm you will excuse me and my haste.”