In Oct. we will begin our Folk Art / Appalachian Unit by studying the self-taught folk artist Grandma Moses.
Anna Mary Robertson was called Grandma Moses by the press when she began a painting career in her 70’s. Anna had a happy childhood and worked hard on the family farm. Her father enjoyed seeing the children’s drawings and would buy them large sheets of blank newspaper upon which they could draw. The young Anna Mary loved to draw happy, colorful scenes. She only attended school in the summer due to the cold and her lack of warm clothing. At twelve she stopped going to school and she began earning her living as a hired girl at homes near the family farm.
It was on her farm in Eagle Ridge that  Grandma Moses painted her first painting. She was wallpapering her parlor and ran out of paper. To finish the room she put up white paper and painted a scene. It is known as the Fireboard, and it hangs today in the Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont.
As she aged and found farm work too difficult, Grandma Moses took up embroidering pictures in yarn to fill her spare time. At the age of seventy-six, because of arthritis, she gave up embroidery and began to paint.
In 1938 a New York engineer and art collector, Louis J. Caldor, saw some of her paintings displayed in a drug store window. They were priced from $3 to $5, depending on size. He bought them all, drove to the artist’s home at Eagle Bridge and bought ten others she had there. The next year, three Grandma Moses paintings were included in an art show in New York.
She was soon world famous. During the 1950s, Grandma Moses’ exhibitions were so popular that they broke attendance records all over the world. A Mother’s Day magazine article noted that despite her fame “Grandma Moses remains prouder of her preserves than of her paintings, and proudest of all of her four children, eleven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.”

Grades 4-5 will be drawing a realistic landscape in the the style of Grandma Moses.