Grandma Moses - Early Life

Early Life

Anna Mary Robertson was born on September 7, 1860, on a farm in Greenwich, upstate New York, one of a family of 10 children. In 1887, at the age of 27, she married a "hired man", Thomas Salmon Moses, and the couple established themselves on a farm in Virginia where they spent nearly two decades. During this time she gave birth to 10 children, five of whom died in infancy. In 1905, the couple returned to New York and settled in Eagle Bridge, not far from Anna Mary's birthplace. In 1927 her husband Thomas died but she continued to farm with the help of her youngest son until advancing age forced her to retire to a daughter's home in 1936.

Often, during her younger days as a wife and mother, she had been creative in her home by, for example, using housepaint to decorate a fireboard—but her earliest works used embroidery rather than paint. Her embroidered pictures were much admired by friends and relatives, so when arthritis eventually made it painful to wield a needle, her sister suggested that it might be easier to paint—the pivotal suggestion that spurred her painting career in her late 70s.