11/07/2025
Releasing creativity is an important health builder. As is hope. Learning to do with what you have. And so much more. What a great story!!
She was 78, too poor for Christmas gifts, so she painted pictures instead.
Art critics rejected her as "amateur."
She became a millionaire anyway.
Eagle Bridge, New York, 1938. Anna Mary Robertson Moses was 78 years old and broke.
She'd spent her entire life working. Born in 1860 (before the Civil War ended), she'd been a farmer's daughter, then a hired girl, then a farmer's wife.
Seventy-eight years of hard labor. Raising ten children (five died in infancy). Running a farm. Churning butter. Making soap. Sewing clothes. Growing food. Surviving.
No art. No hobbies. No time for "creativity." Just survival.
By 1938, her husband was dead. Her children were grown. Her hands were crippled with arthritis—so bad she couldn't hold an embroidery needle anymore.
She was poor, alone, and running out of ways to contribute.
Then Christmas came.
Anna wanted to give her children and grandchildren presents. But she had no money. Farm life had never made them rich, and now, living on a small income, she couldn't afford store-bought gifts.
So she painted them pictures.
Not because she was an artist. Because she was broke and needed something to give.
She used old boards and scraps of canvas. Cheap house paints. Whatever brushes she could find.
She painted scenes she remembered: farms in winter, children sledding, sugaring-off parties, country fairs. Simple, colorful, naive paintings that looked like a child had made them.
Her family liked them. They were cheerful. Nostalgic. They hung them in their homes.
Anna kept painting.
Not for fame. Not for money. Just to fill time. To keep her hands busy now that she couldn't embroider.
She made dozens of paintings. Her daughter suggested she try selling them at the local drugstore in Hoosick Falls—Thomas's Drug Store sold her homemade jam, so why not paintings?
The pharmacist agreed. He hung a few paintings in the window, priced between $3 and $5.
They sat there for months. Nobody bought them.
October 1938. A man walked past Thomas's Drug Store.
His name was Louis Caldor. He was an art collector from New York City, driving through upstate New York looking for antiques.
He saw the paintings in the drugstore window and stopped.
They were... strange. Primitive. Untrained. But there was something about them—a sincerity, a warmth, an authenticity that trained artists often lost.
He went inside. Asked who painted them.
"Some old lady farmer," the pharmacist said. "Name's Moses. She lives outside town."
Caldor bought every painting in the store. Then he drove to Anna's farmhouse and bought everything she had—about ten more paintings.
Anna was confused.
This man from the city wanted to pay her for her amateur paintings? The ones she'd made because she was too poor to buy Christmas gifts?
She sold them to him for $3-5 each. About $60-70 in today's money.
Caldor drove back to New York City with a trunk full of paintings by an unknown 78-year-old farmwife.
For the next year, Caldor tried to get galleries interested.
They all said no.
"Too primitive." "Not real art." "Amateur work." "She has no training."
The New York art world in 1939 was dominated by Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, European modernism. Serious, sophisticated, intellectual art.
Anna's cheerful farm scenes looked like children's book illustrations. No respected gallery would touch them.
But Caldor didn't give up.
In October 1939, he convinced the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to include three of Anna's paintings in a group exhibition called "Contemporary Unknown American Painters."
The show opened. Critics ignored Anna's work. They weren't interested in folk art by an old woman.
But the public loved them.
People would stand in front of Anna's paintings and smile. They reminded viewers of their own childhoods, their grandparents' farms, simpler times.
November 1940. A breakthrough.
A prestigious New York gallery—Galerie St. Etienne—agreed to give Anna a solo exhibition. Her first.
The owner, Otto Kallir, had fled Nazi Austria. He appreciated folk art, naive art, art that came from the soul rather than art schools.
He titled the show: "What a Farm Wife Painted."
Anna Mary Robertson Moses became "Grandma Moses"—a marketing name that emphasized her age, her ordinariness, her authenticity.
The exhibition was a sensation.
Not with art critics—they still dismissed her as "primitive" and "untrained."
But with regular people. Americans exhausted by the Depression and worried about World War II found comfort in Grandma Moses's paintings. They were happy. Optimistic. Nostalgic for a simpler America.
Paintings sold out. Newspapers wrote features. Magazines published stories. Grandma Moses became famous overnight.
She was 80 years old.
For the next 21 years, Grandma Moses painted constantly.
She produced over 1,600 paintings between ages 78 and 101. Hundreds sold for thousands of dollars each—astronomical money for a woman who'd been too poor to buy Christmas gifts just a few years earlier.
She appeared on the cover of Time magazine (1953). She met President Harry Truman at the White House. She appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Greeting card companies licensed her images. She was on postage stamps.
She became one of the most famous artists in America.
Not despite being an untrained 80-year-old farmer—because of it.
People were tired of elite, inaccessible art. They wanted warmth, nostalgia, beauty they could understand.
Grandma Moses gave them that.
Art critics still dismissed her.
They called her work "kitsch." "Sentimental." "Not serious art."
But the public didn't care. They loved her. She represented something pure—creativity untainted by art school snobbery, by theory, by intellectualism.
She painted what she knew: farms, seasons, community, hard work, simple pleasures.
And people responded.
Grandma Moses painted until she literally couldn't anymore.
On her 100th birthday (September 7, 1960), New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared it "Grandma Moses Day."
She kept painting. Even at 101, her hands still worked, still held brushes despite the arthritis.
Her last painting was completed in 1961, just months before her death.
Grandma Moses died on December 13, 1961, at age 101.
She'd lived through:
• The Civil War (born 1860)
• The Industrial Revolution
• World War I
• The Great Depression
• World War II
• The Nuclear Age
• The Space Age
And in her final 23 years (ages 78-101), she became one of America's most beloved artists.
Her estate was worth millions.
The woman who'd been too poor to buy Christmas gifts in 1938 died a millionaire in 1961.
Her paintings now sell for $100,000-1.2 million at auction.
Not bad for "amateur" work by an "untrained" old woman.
Here's why Grandma Moses's story matters:
Not because "anyone can be an artist" (though that's true).
Not because "it's never too late" (though that's also true).
But because she proved that authenticity beats training.
Art critics wanted sophistication. The public wanted sincerity.
Art schools taught technique. Grandma Moses painted truth.
Elite galleries wanted innovation. Regular people wanted beauty.
Grandma Moses didn't care about art world rules because she didn't know them.
She just painted what she remembered. What she loved. What made her happy.
And millions of people responded because they'd been waiting for art that made them feel something other than confused or inadequate.
Today, "Grandma Moses" is synonymous with:
• Late-blooming success
• Folk art authenticity
• The triumph of sincerity over pretension
Anna Mary Robertson Moses: Born September 7, 1860. Died December 13, 1961.
Farmer's wife for 78 years.
Artist for 23 years.
Painted 1,600+ works.
Made millions.
Rejected by critics as "primitive."
Loved by the public as authentic.
Started because she was too poor to buy Christmas gifts.
Ended as one of America's most famous artists.
Proved that:
• 78 is not too old to start
• Poverty is not permanent
• Art critics don't decide what's art—the public does
• Training is not required—truth is
• The most powerful art comes from the most honest place
Her paintings are in museums worldwide.
Her image is on postage stamps.
Her story is still inspiring people 60+ years after her death.
Because Grandma Moses proved something radical:
You don't need permission to be an artist.
You don't need training to create beauty.
You don't need youth to start something new.
You just need:
• Something to say
• The courage to say it
• The refusal to listen when critics say you're not good enough
Grandma Moses was 78, broke, and "untrained."
She painted anyway.
And became a legend.
So what's your excuse?
