Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma) Moses 1860-1961

Sale: Plaza Art Galleries, New York, May 5, 1949, no. 164
Private Collection (sold: Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, October 25, 1979, lot 247A, illustrated)
Sale: Butterfield and Butterfield, San Francisco, California, March 24, 1983, Lot 2839, illustrated
Private Collection (acquired at the above sale)

Anna Mary Robertson Moses, also known as Grandma Moses, began painting as a child and continued into her last years, compelled by an innate appreciation of beauty and a need to do something useful.  Supporting herself as a domestic servant at the early age of thirteen, she continuously maintained side businesses even after her marriage to a local farmer. In addition to selling butter, raising chickens and taking boarders in to her home in order to generate pocket money, she also sold her paintings for two or three dollars at the corner store in Hoosik Falls, New York. It was here, at Thomas' Drug Store, in the spring of 1938 that amateur collector Louis J. Caldor first encountered Robertson's work. Leaving the store with twelve of her paintings, Caldor wasted little time in showing them to fellow Austro-Hungarian, Otto Kallir, a modern art expert and gallery owner in New York. In 1940, at the age of 80, Grandma Moses had her first solo exhibition at Kallir's Galerie St. Etienne.

Grandma Moses painted prodigiously throughout her life, completing over 1,600 works before her death in 1961. These compositions often depict recurring motifs from her rural life, inspired by either her own personal experiences and memory, or the images and newspaper clippings she methodically collected.

In The Last Covered Bridge, 1944, two horse-drawn sleighs cross paths in the center of this large scale work depicting a wintry country day. Moses's color choices were defined by what she perceived directly and she was not inclined to accept an academic approach to color theory if it contradicted her personal observation.  In talking about painting snow she said, "they tell me I should shade it [snow] more, or use more blue, but I have looked at the snow and looked at the snow, and I can see no blue, sometimes there is a little shadow of a tree, but that would be gray, instead of blue, as I see it" (Grandma Moses, My Life's History, ed. Otto Kallir, New York, 1952, p. 134). Instead of varying her color choice in order to articulate snow, Moses uses complex textures of paint in fluctuating brushstrokes and layers on the surface of her canvas. Consequently, the snow in the trees differentiates itself from the snow on the roof of the bridge, and yet again from the snow in the distant fields, through the manipulation of the paint's texture, weight and application method.