Art: Presents from Grandma

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In the sunny front room of a trim ranch house in Upper New York State, a sprightly little old lady sat working one day last week, an array of paint tubes on the table in front of her. Through the window she could see the fallow corn and tomato fields falling away to the Hoosic River, which curves northwest toward the hamlet of Eagle Bridge (pop. 250). Sycamores edged the riverbank; the hills beyond were quilted with thick-ranked birch and maple trees and patches of frosty pasture land. Anna Mary Robertson Moses —better known around the globe as "Grandma Moses"—sketched in the line of distant hills on a piece of white-coated Masonite. Then she dipped her brush —worn down to the barest bristle—in a can lid of turpentine and rubbed it on the mouth of a tube of burnt umber.

Peering through her spectacles, chatting as she worked, she added some ungainly vertical strokes of brown in the right foreground, explaining: "This is a butternut tree. When I was a girl there was a butternut tree way down yonder by the river. I used to go down and gather the nuts." She smeared green on the brush and began daubing in leaves. "This is what I like this brush for—you can make leaves so easy with it. Now I'll put on some yellowish green, and whitish green, like you see on the undersides when the wind blows them."

Pointing to the center of the panel, she announced: "There'll be an old mill there, and I guess I'll have some oxen goin' to the mill with a load of grain." Tapping her forehead, she added: "I can see the whole picture right here."

The Oldtimy Things. In the years since she first started painting these rosy visions of her imagination, Grandma Moses has earned a unique place in the hearts of millions, and in the history of American art. Her paintings (more than 1,500 by her own count) have been shown in more than 160 U.S. exhibitions, and in five one-man shows abroad. She is represented in nine American museums and in Vienna's State Gallery; hers is the only "Ecole Americaine" picture hanging in Paris' Museum of Modern Art. Grandma's originals—priced at $150 to $3,000 each —hang on the walls of such discriminating collectors as Mrs. Albert D. Lasker, Katharine Cornell and Thomas J. Watson. Reproductions of her work have entered thousands of less famed American homes, along with Grandma Moses china, fabrics, tiles, and, most of all, Christmas cards. Altogether some 48 million of her cards have been sold in the U.S. Next year, for the first time, they will also be printed in Vienna and distributed in 15 European countries.

The secret of Grandma's success lies partly in her back-door approach to painting. Most painters make a great display of devoting their lives to art. Grandma Moses, who did not even think of painting seriously until she was 76, devotes her art to her life. It is commemoration, celebration and thanks for the blessings of her many fruitful years. The results (opposite) are as cheery, nostalgic yet commonsensical as Grandma herself. Says she: "I like to paint oldtimy things—something real pretty. Most of them are daydreams, as it were." Then she smiles and adds reflectively: "I will say that I have did remarkable for one of my years and experience."