Grandma Moses Is Born Upstate

Anna Mary Robertson was born on September 7, 1860, in Greenwich, in Washington County, the third of ten children of Margaret Shanahan Robertson and Russell King Robertson, who ran a flax mill and farmed the land. She married a hired hand named Thomas Salmon Moses at 27, raised five children to adulthood after losing five in infancy, and spent most of her life doing farm work in upstate New York and Virginia, not making art. It was arthritis, not ambition, that changed things: when embroidery got too painful for her hands, her sister Celestia suggested she try painting instead. She began painting in earnest at 78, working from memory to depict the farm life she'd actually lived, and by the time critics and collectors found her, she'd already lived nearly eight decades as an unknown.