Though we associate Grandma Moses' paintings with a sort of stability that is seemingly long lost, the Moses family in fact moved a great many times.

Moses herself, in adolescence and young adulthood, worked as a "hired girl" on a number of different farms. And after she married and moved to the South with her husband, Thomas, the couple were tenant farmers on several properties. They actually only owned two farms: "Mount Airy" in Virginia and "Mount Nebo" in Eagle Bridge, New York.

Of the family's various moves, the biggest was undoubtedly the one back North to the final Moses homestead in Eagle Bridge. With five children of disparate ages, livestock, and a full house of furniture, it was a huge undertaking. (Farm implements were generally auctioned locally or sold with the farm.)

"We chartered a railroad car," Moses recalled, "and we brought the stuff we had—a piano and beds and necessary things up here that way."

By taking a car, we could bring a lot of produce, apples, meat—we butchered a hog—a cow, hens, and stock. With the car, if there was livestock in it, we had to have a man to take care of it. So Thomas went with the car, but he smuggled in the two little boys, Forrest and Loyd, besides himself... In one corner was the cow tied up with the feed and the fork for manure. In another corner was the chicken coop and in the other was the produce. The apples made the whole car smell. And the little black and tan dog went with them, too. So now, that was a family.

 

Moses' very first paintings, possibly conditioned by the format of the greeting cards and prints which inspired them, had been quite small. However, from the start of her professional career, all her advisors—Louis Caldor, Otto Kallir, and Ala Story—encouraged her to paint bigger pictures. With growing confidence and a surer technique, the artist happily complied, and her mature work averages between about 12 x 16" and 24 x 27". Moses also executed about a dozen oversized works, such as Country Fair, on canvases specially provided by Ala Story. These canvases were too large for the "tip-up" table that the artist customarily used, and instead had to be laid flat on her bed. Moses was not entirely pleased with the results, calling them "really too large to be pretty," but in fact the push to bigger sizes literally forced her to expand her horizons. In these oversized paintings, she exploited the scale to the maximum, creating a far richer and more complex composition than would have been possible on a smaller canvas.

Country fairs were important social events in the days before modern technology facilitated ready travel and communication. Often, these annual gatherings were the only times that all the members of a larger rural community would meet.

"There was a time when I would look forward from one fall to another just to go to the fair, and summer picnics," Moses wrote.

Those were about all the recreations we had in those days, and we would work the year through saving our money and our clothing.

The first fair I ever went to was the State Fair in the year of 1876; the grounds were between Troy and Albany...

lire first building we went through was the flower building, and oh, was that not grand! We had a lovely flower garden at home, but not like that, and oh it was so sweet and delightful in there. We stayed there till sun down.

The next morning we all went back, to the fair, and this time we went through the poultry house [and] the stove building... All along one side were cast iron cooking stoves of every description. Behind every stove was a cook or chef and a table, and as you -passed the stove, someone would pass out to you some of the food that they were cooking on or in that stove. Sometimes it would be hot rolls nicely buttered, then the next stove hot gingerbread or pies, and so forth. We did not have to go home for dinner, nor could we eat all that we got, and everything was the best. Oh, those were the days—no hot dogs or sandwiches, that one never knows what the contents is!
 

Few of Grandma Moses' paintings are directly autobiographical, though some observers have tried to identify the painted characters with specific people in the artist's life. On occasion, perhaps to tweak inquisitive reporters, Moses would say that she was the woman in the lavender dress. At other times, however, she tended to contradict such statements.

Joy Ride is probably based on a generalized rather than a specific memory. The artist recalled that whenever there was a deep snowfall, "father would hitch up the horses to the old big red sleigh and break out all of the roads, as we lived back in the fields, probably half a mile from the main road, and father had to keep the road open."

He would drive up to the kitchen door, and we would all climb into the sleigh onto a lot of straw and blankets, and away we would go, out to the main road, then on through the woods; and oh! that was grand to drive under the hemlock and have the snow fall on us! Then back home and around the barn, back to the house. Oh, those happy days!

Then the sun came out and melted the snow on top, and then it froze so hard, it would almost hold up a horse. It was so cold, my brothers could not go to school, and we played on the crust on the snow. We would go up a field above the orchard, get on our sleighs, and away we would go'. Lester had a sleigh with cast iron runners, Horace had an old wash bench, upside down, but tot safe, Arthur a dust pan, and I an old scoop shovel. Oh, what fun! We would play out for hours, and the thermometer at 25 below zero.

 

Moses was never entirely comfortable painting interiors, and one method she used to get around her discomfort was to paint cutaway, dollhouse-like views of houses. This allowed her to depict interior and exterior at once. She was always happier if she could imagine a scene in a natural setting.

Halloween is without a doubt one of the artists most successful such "dollhouse" pictures. The landscape background sets a mood of extreme spookiness: Clouds scud across the moon, trees glow silver in the darkness, and the houses in the distance look haunted. The slightly discordant palette of white, gray, green, and orange underscores this sense of subliminal unease, which contrasts sharply with the merry goings-on in the fore- and middle ground. Moses' children were cheery pranksters, and Halloween records a number of typical Halloween escapades: little girls dressed as ghosts, boys on the roof stuffing pumpkins down the chimney, or rattling a cart of coals to make scary noises. Downstairs, the adults arc preparing more sedate entertainment: Men are unloading barrels of eider, and a woman stokes the fire while children bob for apples.

 

Often, self-taught artists show little evidence of stylistic growth. They seem to hit their stride with their first works and just stay there. In some cases (for example, that of John Kane or Morris Hirshfield) this is because a late-life career allows scant time for change. In other cases, the person in question does not have a great deal of intellectual curiosity about the creative process. And, finally, there are a number of folk painters who hit upon a marketable style and intentionally stick to it.

There is no intrinsic reason, however, why a self-taught artist should not develop just as a trained one does. Painting is an evolutionary process, and a visually astute person should logically examine his or her work in progress, learning from both successes and failures. Grandma Moses, above and beyond most self-taught artists, displayed an exceptional ability to learn from her work. And since, unlike Kane, Hirshfield, Pippin, and many other folk painters of her era, she lived a remarkably long life, she had a chance to explore her creative potential to its fullest.

It may seem ironic to speak of an "old age" style in someone whose career did not effectively start until she was 80, but in fact the last works of Grandma Moses evidence a conceptual kinship with the later work of other long-lived painters, such as Rembrandt. There is a comparable loosening of brushwork and similar shorthand approach to form in Moses' paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s. In Eagle Bridge Hotel, the human and animal figures are painted with far less precision than one finds in works from the 1940s. The foliage is daubed erratically onto the trees, and a narrower horizontal format forces more compression of detail. As a result, the artist's message is telegraphed with much greater immediacy than was formerly the case. The overall impression is significantly more spontaneous, more expressionistic.

 

Although Grandma Moses was always open to new challenges, she x A. resisted attempts by outsiders to dictate to her in terms of style or subject matter. "Someone has asked me to paint Biblical pictures," she once noted, "and I say no, I'll not paint something that we know nothing about; might just as well paint something that will happen a thousand years hence."

Nevertheless, despite her staunch adherence to the factual and true, less than two years before she died Moses acceded to a request to illustrate a children's book, Clement C. Moore's famous poem, "The Night Before Christmas." Just as she rose to and ultimately mastered the challenge of painting interiors, Moses—even at the age of nearly 100—was ready to risk something completely untried. Unfortunately, she did not live to see the publication of The Night Before Christmas, which appeared in 1962 and remained more or less continuously in print for the next three decades.

While many of the Night Before Christmas illustrations dutifully follow the text of the poem, So Long Till Next Year is pure fantasy on Moses' part. Not actually published in the original edition of the book, it is nonetheless in many ways the quintessential Christmas painting by an artist who was famous for such subjects. Unlike most of Moses' snowscapes, which are clearly grounded in nature, the blue background of So Long Till Next Year immediately informs us that we are in the realm of the imagination. The scenery is etched on this background in a frosty filigree, like icicles on a window pane. Above all, So Long Till Next Year demonstrates Moses' exceptional flexibility and versatility.

 

Grandma Moses continued to paint well into her 101st year, although during the last few months of her life she was too weak to do any work. The Rainbow, executed in June 1961, is generally considered her last finished picture. As such, it is an amazing distillation of the artist's world view as well as of her final style.

Like Eagle Bridge Hotel, The Rainbow represents Moses' "old age" style in all its glory. The paint handling has become quite wild, nearly expressionistic. This facilitated a joyous free-for-all of color. Figural vignettes, once so clearly set off from the landscape, here merge with their surroundings: Nature and humankind are at last one. Moses is no longer terribly concerned with representational accuracy in her use of color; the emotional impact is paramount. The exuberant swish of the scythes, candy-striped in yellow, white, and red, and the spun-sugar puff of pink flowers, out of which a hay wagon rises like a small triumphant chariot, are presented as bright symbols in paint, tokens of peace, an offering of hope.