“It is never too late to become what you might have been.” George Eliot

1860, Greenwich, New York: Anna Mary Robertson was born on a farm with five brothers and four sisters and did her share of the chores around the farm. With money scarce, her parents hired her out at age 12 to work on neighboring farms. At age 27, she met and married another hired farmhand, Thomas Moses.

Two decades after the Civil War, Anna Mary and Thomas heard that Yankees could get rich in the South. So, they moved to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, where they were hired as tenant farmers. Anna Mary churned butter and made potato chips to supplement their meager income. They never got rich, but in 1905, they had saved enough money to buy a small farm close to the Vermont border in Eagle Bridge, New York.

Anna Mary helped care for the livestock, gardened, and canned vegetables. She won awards at country fairs for her pies, jams and jellies. When she was in her 50s, her daughter suggested she take up needlepoint and embroidering. Anna Mary fell in love with the craft. She gave her embroidered pictures to anyone who would take them.

When arthritis made needle point painful, a friend encouraged Anna Mary to consider painting pictures. At age 78, she began painting in earnest. Her first paintings were done on cardboard with house paint on an old kitchen table in a small utility room. Anna Mary painted from her farm experiences. Tiny, bent, and frail with work-worn, arthritic hands, she loved painting farm scenes with Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas themes. She painted farmhouses, churches, and families planting gardens.

Anna Mary gave most of her paintings away but occasionally displayed them next to her Blue Ribbon preserves at fairs. She sold them for $3-5 each, which supplemented her meager income. At the request of a local drugstore, she exhibited some of her paintings for sale in the store window. Her artwork sat idle in the window for two years, gathering dust.

On Easter weekend in 1938, Louis Caldor, a folk art collector from New York City, went through Eagle Bridge and discovered Anna Mary’s paintings at the drugstore. He bought all her paintings on display and got directions to her small farmhouse, where he purchased 10 more. Caldor promised to make Anna Mary famous. She thought he was crazy.

Caldor took his collection of Anna Mary’s paintings to New York City art museums. Although several museums admired the artwork, when they learned the artist was 78, there was no interest in an art exhibit. In 1939, Caldor persuaded the New York Museum of Modern Art to display three paintings in a private viewing. Still, the paintings received little attention from the art admirers.

A year later, Caldor convinced the new Galerie St. Etienne Art Museum in New York City to exhibit Anna Mary’s paintings in a collection titled “What a Farmwife Painted.” The exhibition was modestly successful. A few months later, Caldor displayed the paintings at Gimbel’s Department Store at Thanksgiving and invited Anna Mary to attend.

The feisty, straight-talking 80-year-old, wearing a black hat and lace dress, delighted the New York newspaper reporters. On that cold November day in 1940, Grandma Moses’ artistic career and legend were born. She began to exhibit her art in New York City and upstate New York. Over the next two decades, her fame spread nationally and then internationally.

Anna Mary never understood her celebrity. She told a reporter, “If people want to make a fuss over me, I let them, but I’m the same person I have always been.” She was amazed that people would pay such high prices for her paintings. Her paintings which sold for $5 in Eagle Bridge frequently garnered $8,000 to $10,000 elsewhere.

At age 93, Grandma Moses was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. Life Magazine did a cover story on her 100th birthday. She was a prolific artist, completing 1,600 paintings in her lifetime. Anna Mary Moses painted until her death on December 13, 1961, at age 101.

 “People always say that it’s too late,” said the grandmother of 11, “But in fact, now is the best and appropriate time. A new life can begin at 80. Painting isn’t important. The important thing is to stay busy. If I hadn’t started painting, I would have raised chickens.”