Anna Mary Robertson By: Jim Lane The Old Checkered House in Winter Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses 20"x24", oils (Click on picture for more of Grandma Moses' work.)

Christmas summons up a host of beautiful images--nativities, Santas, greenery, carolers, even the hustle and bustle of gaily decorated department stores filled with harried last-minute shoppers. On a quieter note, it brings to mind the solemn stillness of deep, blue, snowy winter nights--silent nights. It brings to mind lovely New England snowscapes, of busy little New Hampshire villages teeming with children, playing in the snow, sled-riding, skating, and the musical jingle bells on a one-horse open sleigh. It brings to mind Anna Mary Robertson Moses.

If you don't recognize the name, perhaps the fact that she didn't start painting until she was 76, and the fact that by then she'd raised five children (five others died in infancy) and two of her grandchildren. Thus the nickname "Grandma" came naturally. Grandma Moses, one might say, had TWO lives, her "early" years living on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, raising children, enjoying the kind of good life which today so captivates us in her work. Her second life began in 1936 when she, like Lana Turner, was discovered in a drugstore...that is her WORK was. A New York art collector, Louis Calder, saw one of her paintings in the window of the local pharmacy in Hossick Falls, New York, not far from where the artist lived at the time. He purchased it, met her, and from that point on, shepherded her into the emerging folk art world on the 1930s.

Anna Robertson was born in 1860 in Greenwich, New York. At the age of twelve, she began working as a "hired girl" on local farms. She was 27 before she met and married a local farmer, Thomas Salmon Moses. They moved to Virginia where they lived for several years before moving back to New York, to a farm near Eagle Bridge. After her husband's death in 1927, Anna Moses moved to yet another farm near Bennington, Vermont, for a time where she raised her daughter's children following their mother's death. It was during this time that she first began to paint for friends and neighbors. However her major form of artwork during the early 1930s involved embroidery.

Later, her second stint at motherhood behind her, Grandma Moses moved back to the family farm in upstate New York where her neuritis forced her to give up needlework in favor of painting. Years later she remarked, "If I hadn't started painting, I'd have raised chickens." Even so, her exposure as an artist was limited for many years to local county fairs where her paintings were displayed next to her canned preserves. After her discovery by collectors in the late 1930's, already well into her seventies, she was characteristically modest about her place as American's number one primitive artists. She noted, "A primitive artist is just an amateur whose work sells." And though she painted her fun-filled interiors and busy rural landscapes depicting New England life in all seasons, it is her winter scenes that seem to make her the MATRON saint of Christmas artists.

Today the work of Grandma Moses can be seen most profusely in the Bennington Museum which recently reported the return of seven stolen paintings bringing it's total collection of her work to 38 out of the more than 1,600 created over her lifetime. Given the fact that she didn't start painting until she was 76, her output was prodigious. In her hundredth year of her life, (she lived to be 101), she turned out over 160 paintings. The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center in Williamsburg, Virginia, also has a sizable collection of her work, set amongst the elegant splendor of the colonial capital of the state, which is especially beautiful during the Christmas Season. Folk art, like Christmas, does not apply to a particular time period of long ago, but rather it is always present, and like the spirit of Christmas, warms us inside, bringing love, laughter, and LIFE, as it can be...should be...and would be if we could all exude the same feelings of joyous simplicity during the rest of our numbered days on this earth. Enjoy Christmas this year, and make an early resolution to keep ON enjoying it every day of the new year.

Jim Lane is fifty-ish, balding, bearded, bespectacled, professorial, outgoing, knowledgable about a lot of things, expert on a very few. He grew up in the small town of Stockport, situated on the Muskingum River in Southeastern Ohio. He graduated from a un-noteworthy business college in Cincinnati, from the U.S. Air Force, and from Ohio University where he also obtained a masters degree and wracked up several hours of post-graduate work as well. For most of his professional life he's run a portrait business out of his home, specializing in sports portraits done in pencil and colored pencil.

Happily married for almost 30 years, Jim taught elementary and high school art for 26 years and also spent many enjoyable hours in the front of a local community college classroom. Recently he has retired from teaching in favor of painting, traveling, writing, designing web pages, and "...doing things I've never done before."

E-mail Jim at: jimlane@jimlaneart.com

Visit The Jim Lane Collection at:   http://www.jimlaneart.com

Or Jim Lane's Arty-fact Archives at:   http://www.1st.net/users/jimlane/Archive.html