Grandma Moses: Secrets of Success
Grandma Moses Naïve Painting – Inspiration for Hard Times
The success story of Grandma Moses painting holds so much guidance for today’s entrepreneurs. Her art became a lasting business.
Born on September 7, 1860 in the State of New York, a woman named Anna Mary Robertson Moses died in December 1961, at 101 years old. In between, the lady later affectionately known as “Grandma Moses” was to become one of America’s best known artists.
She started out her career quite simply, at the age of 78, to become a, now, highly regarded and successful painter.
…. it looked at bit like this at the time:
(Grandma) would sit on an old, battered swivel chair, perching on two large pillows. The Masonitepressboard, is a type of engineered wood on which she painted would lie flat on an old kitchen table before her. There was no easel. Crowding her in her “studio” were an electric washer and dryer that had overflowed from the kitchen.
What follows is a focus on her traits and how that contributed to her phenomenal success in a full, long, and fruitful life.
Bringing Simple Homespun Life into View
A Country Wedding – Grandma Moses painting
A Story of Yankee Know-how
Long before she become an art sensation, Anna Mary Robertson Moses lived a life built of making a success out of challenges. She had that Yankee spirit of early America that we think of as “can-do”.
Grandma Moses Art was Nostalgic
Her paintings were filled with the story of this part of America’s life that we all most love: simple pleasures, hard work, and a good dose of fun. Family and farm, the wide open spaces, and joy in the everyday things of life were her motifs. She was to folk art painting what Laura Ingalls Wilder was to children’s literature: a loving look back at a traditional and passing way of life, a personal history shared through appreciative eyes.
I learned a lot from Grandma Moses’ life, and she became one of my heroes. Besides the affection I have for the childlike, yet surprisingly telling paintings she produced, I was captured by her grit, no-nonsense approach to life, and optimism.
Her life holds some secrets of success for a person of any time or place. We can learn from her Yankee know-how.
What is Yankee Know-how?
It is setting your sights on a goal to accomplish, then setting about the hard work of getting the job done. Knowing how to use ingenuity to do a job better, while buckling down and applying elbow grease when necessary are also a part of the recipe. It is a mix of the right attitude and determined hard work. Probably best exemplified by the biographies of some of the people of American history and culture, like Grandma Moses. There is a certain amount of grit and tenacity involved as well.
How to succeed like Grandma Moses? Read on.
Success Can Be Learned – How to succeed like Grandma Moses
There is no magic bullet, but there are keys that people have found to be a pattern in achieving success. You might find some real help for your own solutions in an inspiring book about Grandma Moses.
Paintings that Tell a Story
Grandma Moses Taking in The Laundry Art Print Canvas Art 08x10inch
“Taking in the Laundry” tells the kind of story that Anna Mary Robinson Moses (Grandma Moses) loved to tell. Old fashioned activities like hanging fresh washed laundry on a line are given drama when the threat of an impending storm, with wind bending the trees comes into the view. Childlike style, but expertly placed composition combine in the stories that Moses’ paintings tell. Her paintings create warm sentiments of home and a simpler time.These are a few of the reasons they are so loved, even today.
Grandma Moses Taking in The Laundry Art Prints Canvas Painting Decor 20x30inch
An example of the activities of her past, that Anna Robinson Moses (Grandma Moses} loved to depict. The colors are reminders of a New England summer landscape and the childlike painting is quite detailed and expertly composed. A print for your own walls.
Buy Now through my affiliate link
Early Photo of Grandma Moses, Age 15
Anna Mary Robertson at age 15
Before Fame, Simple Hard Work
Her early life was typical for her time. America was still in its earlier years, but was in the crisis of the Civil War during her childhood. Children worked early and were much needed labor on family farms.
The Yankee Attitude Forged
She was born Anna Mary Robertson, in 1860. The nation was about to enter the crucible of the Civil War when Anna Mary entered the world of “green meadows and wild woods on a farm in Washington County” in New York. She was the oldest girl, third-born, in a large Scots-Irish family of ten children. And while those days were commonly filled with many chores, she remembered them as happy and carefree. Being industrious and frugal were highly regarded qualities and set the pattern of her life.
She had the normal bit of schooling for girls of her age in that time, but soon was “hired out” to earn her living as household help at age twelve.Although the workload was one we would consider heavy, she felt she was treated kindly, as one of the family. At age 26 Anna Mary had moved on to another position where she met the “hired man”, Thomas Salmon Moses. They married and decided to move to the South, to Virginia, where they took up farming.
A Move to Shenandoah Valley
It was in Virginia that Grandma Moses put her skills to work alongside her husband, and cleverly started her own business making butter that exceeded anything else available thereabouts. She was successful enough to finance two cows, and had the idea to brand her own butter with a butter mold her husband carved for her. That was followed by jams and jellies for sale, before deciding to move back to their New York beginnings.
Homesick for New York
Taking up dairy farming, it was there that Grandma Moses engaged in all the routines and pastimes that would later fill her pictures. She had become a successful farm wife, capable of running her own businesses engined by her skills and talent.
How She Painted
She liked to sit quietly and think …remember and imagine. “Then I’ll get an inspiration and start painting; then I’ll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it …”
Life Before The Paintings
A farmer’s wife who kept busy and enjoyed making artistic pictures, in between many tasks and raising children.
Grandma Moses Embroidered Art
Always keeping busy with farm chores, housework, and raising her children, it was no different as she got older and was widowed. Yet her stories tell of good humored fun which embroidered her life. She took up making literally embroidered pictures, of little landscapes, until her sister suggested painting instead.
She approached painting with her same desire to keep busy and her career was born. It took only the interest of a traveler through the town of Hoosick Falls, where Grandma Moses had put her pictures on display in a store window. Thus began a career that became (an estimated) more than 1600 canvases of paintings. She started out selling her art creations for two and three dollars each (or three to five depending on who tells the story), but ended up being sold for tens of thousands.
A rare look at her needlework art
Grandma Moses, At Seventy, Begins As An Artist
Grandma Moses painting in the field
Grandma Moses was always self-taught and had a sense of what she thought were “pretty pictures”. Her style was just what the public wanted to see when her naïve, but colorful and narrative paintings were revealed along with the appealing backstory of a simple “farm wife’s” creativity. Old fashioned tasks of corn husking, maple sugaring-off for syrup, making quilts, and candle making were represented in her works and harked back to simpler times and to American virtues of diligent work in agricultural community.
Grandma Moses embodied the character of no-nonsense Yankee ingenuity, able to use “Scotch thrift” to make something out of nothing, and put the best face on the circumstances of life. She was also able to transfer those sentiments through her painting.
Her subject matter was of the life she had known, but many of her works (especially at first) borrowed from illustrations in books and Currier and Ives prints. These were used as inspiration, but her style and completed paintings were wholly her own. Often artists take elements from such diverse things as perspective, symbolic objects, or common scenes in everyday life for their compositions; it is how they put them together and their original style that sets an artist apart.
The Artist’s Inspiration
“Moses gathered her sources for the vignettes and figural groupings from popular media, such as magazine illustrations, greeting cards, and advertisements. She traced the contours of figures and buildings and incorporated them into her compositions, carefully saving the clippings for future use.” ~ American Art
Using oils, she usually painted on Masonite board. (My father used to use that material for projects when I was a child, it is a brown colored pressed wood board, not very thick with a shiny side and a rough corrugated one, it is stiff, but not as heavy or strong as a slab of wood.) She usually cut the boards to a size of 2×3 feet. She also made some small paintings on dried tree mushrooms, as well as a some on ceramic tile.
The Right Time For Folk Art
The Art World has trends and fads like other forms of culture. The Modernist movement in the Thirties and Forties of 20th Century America saw a parallel taste for simple Folk Art forms. The nation hungered for memories of an earlier time.
Entrepreneurial Spirit
Her art became hugely popular, and found many commercial applications from greeting cards to fabrics.
The Riverdale Fabric Co., active from 1950 to 1967, was given permission to market drapery fabric designs with exact replicas of her paintings. Many enterprising people framed that fabric and made framed “wall art” from the fabrics.
Example of Grandma Moses painting interpreted in fabric of the 1950s
Products, especially fabrics were printed with the popular Grandma Moses landscapes.
Think About It
Grandma Moses paintings were “discovered” by Louis Caldor, an art collector on vacation from New York City. What would have happened if she had never had her paintings in that drugstore window?
Grandma Moses’ Secret Recipe For Success
Medium: Tempera paint and colored pencils
Art Supplies – to bring out your inner Grandma Moses
You might find as much enjoyment in creating pictures as Grandma did, and maybe uncover a talent! But you need some art supplies. Start by buying your brushes, then go on to get some canvas and paints. Once supplied, let your creativity loose!
Art Advantage Brush Set t Oil/Acrylic 24pc
Buy this set of a wide variety of brushes and get started painting your own masterpieces. I like the different styles of bristles that help a painter to get the effect wanted from the paints. Experimenting with each one, with the help of youtube videos, is an easy way to improve technique quickly.
Try your own painting:
Tips for Success that You Can Use
Whether pursuing your creative impulses or your career, taking tips from Grandma Moses’ life story could aid your own tale of success. Here is a list of things to consider for yourself.
A commemorative stamp was issued in her honor in 1969
A commemorative stamp was issued in her honor in 1969
- Grandma Moses made the best of her opportunities and did not complain
- She showed entrepreneurial spirit and grasped her opportunities to use her talents
- She remained cheerful and showed gratefulness for those in her life
- She was diligent, industrious, and frugal -lessons she learned early in life
- She remained true to herself and her sense of what she liked and valued
- She took pride in her work
Making Apple Butter -1958
Grandma Moses in the 21st Century – Learn more about the art of Grandma Moses
A fascinating look into the art of Grandma Moses with commentary on style and significance, with many illustrative color plates.
An Artist’s View
Grandma Moses: in the 21st Century
What sets apart a naive painting that is considered fine art from just any old painting someone might make? That is an interesting question. This book of commentary, plus examples of Grandma Moses’ paintings, provides an education. And answers that question!
Seth Godin and His Great Ideas
Connect some of his insights to the driving forces in the art and entrepreneurship of Anna Mary Robertson Moses.
” …. many of us fear too much momentum. We look at a project launch or a job or another new commitment as something that might get out of control.
…
Deep down, this potential for an overwhelming response alerts the lizard brain and we hold back. We’re afraid of being part of something that feels like it might be too big for us.
Hint: it probably isn’t.”
-wisdom from Seth Godin
Yankee Character – Grit, Determination, and Thrift
True Accounts of Yankee Ingenuity and Grit from The Cape Cod Voice (American Chronicles)
Grit is a character trait that is behind a great deal of the American success stories. For those who love biographies that illustrate the qualities of success and entrepreneurship, this will be an interesting and educating read.
Perspective
Open your eyes to what can be done, don’t focus on what can’t.
Positive Character Qualities Examined
Seth Godin’s Thoughts on Success and Grandma Moses
She illustrates his lessons for success
Seth Godin wrote a summary of the hierarchy of success.
How did Grandma Moses illustrate his 6 points?
Pointing out that the six points are often taken out of order, Seth gives the sequence this way:
1. Attitude
2. Approach
3. Goals
4. Strategy
5. Tactics
6. Execution
What can Grandma teach you about success in business?
She can teach you a lot about attitude. Grandma Moses had a “can do” attitude that made the best of things and didn’t waste time moping about disappointments. She continually put that attitude to work for herself when moving to different parts of the country, raising her family, and becoming a great success in the hardboiled world of art. She looked at the bright side of her opportunities.
Grandma’s approach to her work was pragmatic. She was practical and she had a good grasp of what she could capitalize on. Long before her art career, she looked around her community and turned her dissatisfaction with the quality of the local butter into a home industry that made it better. Her style was to find a way to meet a need with her arsenal of talents and go to work producing something that gave her pride to produce.
Her goals were simple and true to her values. Grandma didn’t aim to become a great artist, she was not trying to become a V.I.P. Those were side benefits to her goals of making the most of her time and talents and keeping busy. She took advantage of opportunities to supplement her family’s income, obviously viewing herself as a valued partner in building her family and contributing to those around her.
Grandma Moses had a flexible strategy to use what was at hand and make the best of it. She decided to paint, in her own words, when it seemed easier to paint a picture to give to her mailman then to “slave over a hot stove to bake a cake”. One of her early works was a painting she did on a fireboard for her parlor after running out of wallpaper which she would have liked to use to cover it.
“If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens.“
Grandma remained true to her values
Grandma’s tactics were geared to being faithful to expectations, and true to her Yankee values. When promising a specific number of paintings and finding she was one short, Grandma Moses simply divided a larger painting in half. She valued her promise to the buyer higher than her estimation of her production…even if the work was her own created art. Maybe that seems like a misplaced value and a destructive tactic, but it exemplifies her view of doing the best with what she had and fulfilling the needs of a customer.
Her life dictated the execution of her art. She had lived through the early times of America’s most optimistic sense of where it was going, a hardworking, frugal, entrepreneurial America. Executing her work in just that spirit, the spirit of the age in which she had lived.
She worked hard, and produced many paintings, through time she saw her work produced in many transformations: from fabric to greeting cards. Grandma agreed to have her works disseminated throughout everyday America, just like you would expect from an icon of the American housewife of a time gone by, one of our “Grandmas”.
Illustration of Grandma Moses painting at her table
Picture This – A Success Story
Make Your Own… Get some paints and paper, set aside time to let your imagination soar with your idea of art.
“Let Me Help” by Grandma Moses
‘Let Me Help’ painted in 1944
A Cover Girl
Life Magazine cover 1960
Time Magazine cover 1953
More Lessons in Success
One of the reasons Grandma Moses became so famous and successful as an artist was that her optimism and portrayal of the sunny side of life was just what the nation needed after the trials of a Depression and World War. She was a magnifier of all that Americans wanted to remember of what was good in life and about themselves.
Never underestimate the power and attraction of an optimistic and intrepid view of life. People instinctively know they need such encouragement and gravitate towards those who honestly exemplify it.
Grandma Moses Stories – in her own words
Grandma Moses Early Days
Grandma’s Opinion About Life
Painting’s not important. The important thing is keeping busy.
What She Had To Say About Her Life
In her own words, observations on life and memories of the American past create depth in our picture of this legendary woman and her accomplishments.
Grandma Moses Quotations:
Born “back in the green meadows and wild woods on a farm in Washington County. Those were my happy days, free from care or worry, helping Mother, rocking sister’s cradle, taking sewing lessons, from Mother, sporting with my brothers, making rafts to float over the mill pond, roaming the wild woods, gathering flowers, and building air castles.”
“Once Grandma Robertson came, and she brought some tissue paper, green and pink and those colors. Oh, I was rich when I got that! Grandma was a wonderful good woman bringing me that!”
“When I went to school, the teacher would give us maps to draw, and I would make the mountains in my own way. The teacher liked them, and would ask if he might keep them.”
Her view on her marriage, believing “that we were a team and I had to do as much as my husband did, not like some girls, when they sit down, and then somebody has to throw sugar at them.”
“I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday…I look back on my life a good day’s work, it was done and I feel satisfied with it. I made the best out of what life offered.”
“What a strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, the other forward; one is of today, other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.”
America in Bygone Times – Grandma pictured it affectionately
That is a Fine Turkey
“She wrote, “Why do we think we must have turkey for Thanksgiven (sic). Just becaus our Forefathers did, they had it because turkeys were plentyfull, and they did not have other kinds of meat, now we have abundance of other kinds of luxuries, Poor Turkey, He has but one life to give this country.”
American Themes Of Hard Work, Simpler Times
Themes In Her Art
“Turkeys”, a Grandma Moses painting from 1958 when the artist was in her 98th year.
Thanksgiving was a holiday unique to American history, captured within her paintings with the subject of “Catching The Turkey”.
Few people now understand that a successful hunter and farmer meant thriving during the challenging conditions of 19th century America. Her paintings of the past caught the once common experience to go “from farm to table” all in one’s own backyard. It was full of the simple pleasures during those times. It was not all hard work!
In Grandma Moses time, people looked back sentimentally to a rural simplicity full of hard work, but deserved rewards. Celebrations of the character of American ingenuity and self-reliance.
This was perhaps the golden age of American agricultural communities and small towns.
For Grandma Moses, life was indeed a satisfying one, full of the fruits of “keeping busy”, building a home, a family, and her business, whether it was selling apples, butter or artwork.
Old Time Quilting Bee
The Quilting Bee: “I tried that interior but did not like it, so I erased it,” she noted on one occasion. “That don’t seem to be in my line. I like to paint something that leads me on and on into the unknown, something that I want to see away on beyond. Well, maybe I try again.”
See The Real Grandma Moses Circa 1950
View Her Paintings
- Grandma Moses Holiday Paintings
Old fashioned holiday fun and celebration as depicted by Grandma Moses paintings. - Grandma Moses – WikiPaintings.org
Take a look at the gallery of Grandma Moses Paintings
Can I Be The Next Grandma Moses?
You won’t know until you try.
Make Your Own Art Posters At Zazzle
Maybe you can. Today there are so many opportunities to have your artwork noticed. An easy way to market and sell your art is Zazzle, or Etsy -if you want to sell the original pieces.
Who knows? You might become a great commercial success! Like Grandma Moses did.
Create Your Own Art Business
Want to start creating something at Zazzle? It is easy, open an account on their site, for free.
Go there to start creating and selling your art on loads of products.
She was probably most famous for her winter fun paintings. Whether it was Thanksgiving “catching turkeys” or sledding down snow covered hills, there were many opportunities to use the backdrop of winter.
Illustrating some of the many ways country folk made use of their time while waiting for spring planting to arrive depicted in may of these art pieces.
Winter was brightened by the holidays of Thanksgiving and 
Sometimes holidays aren’t official, and in America, especially, we love to celebrate important local events. Maybe that is passed down from our forebears. The community times of quilting bees and barn raisings were all looked forward to and took place in their own seasonal times of year.
Grandma Moses helped record the celebrations of holidays from the self sufficient tasks of the farming culture she was a part of, and recorded how many Americans took advantage of times to get together and have fun while they worked.
Let Me Help!
