Dividing of the Ways194716 x 20 " (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Frame: 18 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 1 1/4 " (47 x 57.2 x 3.2 cm)Oil and tempera on MasoniteGift of Galerie St. Etienne, New York, in memory of Otto Kallir, © 1969 (renewed 1997), Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York1983.10.11Winter snow scene of rural community. Background comprised of hazy sky, mountains and homestead located at right of back scene. Middle ground composed of two homesteads, one to left of winding sleigh trail and one larger complex to right of scene. In foreground of this one vignette are small figures participating in winter activities. Foreground depicts division in sleigh trail with one sleigh with two horses and rider turning off to left of picture, to right of picture a second sleigh and horses with four passengers takes right trail. Two children with small riding sleigh stand watching with backs to viewer. To lower right corner of scene also stands a male viewer with dog.15222644Grandma MosesPaintings© Grandma Moses Properties Co.Eagle BridgeEagle BridgeUnited StatesNew YorkTreasures of Folk Art: Museum of American Folk ArtPaintingsEagle Bridge
Anna Mary Robertson Moses – known to all as Grandma Moses – was a national phenomenon, charming post –World War II America with her idealized paintings of a rural past. Born in upstate New York in 1860, she attended school sporadically and worked as a hired hand for fifteen years before she married. With her husband, Thomas Moses, she had ten children, of whom five survived. The couple lived briefly in Virginia before settling in Eagle Bridge, New York, the setting for much of Moses’ work. She began to paint while in her sixties; her works, exhibited in a local drugstore, were spotted by a collector who brought them to the attention of the New York art world. Moses quickly became America’s best-known artist – national magazines published interviews with her, and millions came to know her work through greeting card reproductions.
A memory painter, Moses depicted an idyllic past where people worked hard, enjoyed simple pleasures, and lived in harmony. Her approach to painting, however, was businesslike. She collected illustrations to use as source material and assembled a scrapbook of motifs that she repeated throughout her work. Moses’ paintings remain fresh, however, because of her careful composition, sensitivity to color, and painterly technique.
In "Dividing of the Ways," Moses presented the rhythm of rural life with the keen understanding of a countrywoman. While men in the background cut and stack wood, boys with sleds and a man with a dog catch up on their neighbors’ activities by watching two sleighs head off in different directions. Within a deceptively simple white and gray landscape, Moses included many anecdotal details and employed a variety of brushstrokes – from striated sky to almost dry dabs representing snow on the tree branches.
Cheryl Rivers, "Dividing of the Ways," in Stacy C. Hollander, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 373.The third of ten children raised on a farm, Anna Mary Robertson left home at age twelve to work on a neighboring farm, where she met her future husband. The couple married in 1887 and moved to Virginia, where they worked as tenant farmers until 1905, when they had saved enough money to buy their own farm in Eagle Bridge, in upstate New York. She herself gave birth to ten children, of whom five died in infancy. At seventy-five years old, three years after the death of her daughter Anna, she began to paint. “Grandma” Moses was known for her bucolic rural scenes affirming American values, depicted in a naive style. The elderly painter captured the American imagination with her humble origins, hard life, and inspirational determination. She quickly became a national and international celebrity; her work was organized into traveling exhibitions, published in monographs, and reproduced on Christmas cards. In 1949 she received a special award from President Truman. As art dealer Jane Kallir explained: “Facing the harsh realities of the Cold-War era, the public took heart in a real-life tale that seemed to prove the old adage, ‘it’s never too late.’ The media seemingly never tired of repeating Moses’ fairy-tale story. In 1953, she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine; in 1960, Life sent noted photographer Cornell Capa to do a cover story on the artist’s 100th birthday. That birthday—declared ‘Grandma Moses Day’ by New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller—was celebrated almost like a holiday in the nation’s press. . . . Her death was front page news all over America and throughoutmuch of Europe.”
Valérie Rousseau, “Dividing of the Ways,” exhibition label for Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum. Stacy C. Hollander and Valérie Rousseau, curators. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2014. The third of ten children raised on a farm, Anna Mary Robertson left home at age twelve to work on a neighboring farm, where she met her future husband. The couple married in 1887 and moved to Virginia, where they worked as tenant farmers until 1905, when they had saved enough money to buy their own farm in Eagle Bridge, in upstate New York. She herself gave birth to ten children, of whom five died in infancy. At seventy-five years old, three years after the death of her daughter Anna, she began to paint. “Grandma” Moses was known for her bucolic rural scenes affirming American values, depicted in a naive style. The elderly painter captured the American imagination with her humble origins, hard life, and inspirational determination. She quickly became a national and international celebrity; her work was organized into traveling exhibitions, published in monographs, and reproduced on Christmas cards. In 1949 she received a special award from President Truman. As art dealer Jane Kallir explained: “Facing the harsh realities of the Cold-War era, the public took heart in a real-life tale that seemed to prove the old adage, ‘it’s never too late.’ The media seemingly never tired of repeating Moses’ fairy-tale story. In 1953, she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine; in 1960, Life sent noted photographer Cornell Capa to do a cover story on the artist’s 100th birthday. That birthday—declared ‘Grandma Moses Day’ by New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller—was celebrated almost like a holiday in the nation’s press. . . . Her death was front page news all over America and throughout much of Europe.”
Valérie Rousseau, “Dividing of the Ways,” exhibition label for Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum. Stacy C. Hollander and Valérie Rousseau, curators. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2014.Winter snow scene of rural community. Background comprised of hazy sky, mountains and homestead located at right of back scene. Middle ground composed of two homesteads, one to left of winding sleigh trail and one larger complex to right of scene. In foreground of this one vignette are small figures participating in winter activities. Foreground depicts division in sleigh trail with one sleigh with two horses and rider turning off to left of picture, to right of picture a second sleigh and horses with four passengers takes right trail. Two children with small riding sleigh stand watching with backs to viewer. To lower right corner of scene also stands a male viewer with dog.
One of ten children, Anna Mary Robertson Moses was born on a rural farm in upstate New York. Her life was bifurcated between the nineteenth century and the twentieth, encompassing the Civil War, Reconstruction, the dawn of a new century, and two world wars. Informed by this remarkable life, her art is quietly and slyly subversive, representing the founding values of an America that ever existed largely in the mythos of invention and imagination, and hinting at harsh truths that lie beneath the nostalgia.
Robertson was "hired out" at the age of twelve to work for a wealthier family on a neighboring farm. It was here she met Thomas Moses, whom she married in 1887. The couple departed immediately for North Carolina, where Thomas had found work in the New South as manager of a horse farm. The newlyweds never made it further than Staunton, Virginia, where they were enthralled by the richness and majesty of the Shenandoah Valley, which was so different from their hardscrabble lives in New York. They started married life as tenant farmers, but eventually were able to purchase their own farm. Moses gave birth to ten children, only five surviving into adulthood. In 1905, they returned to New York and settled in Eagle Bridge, not far from where Moses was born. Her foray into artmaking was incidental and, as befitting her nineteenth-century roots, began with needlework. In 1932, while tending her daughter Anna who was dying from tuberculosis, Moses began to stitch what she called "worsted" pictures. At the age of seventy-five, when arthritis made it hard for her to hold a needle, she turned to paint.
Moses invented various strategies. She collected illustrations and other printed imagery that became resources for her landscapes, which often are filled with people at various activities associated with rural life. Her paintings were displayed first at county fairs, then exhibited in nearby Hoosick Falls at a woman’s exchange. Through the persistent interest of Louis Caldor, an engineer passing through, they came to the attention of New York gallerist Otto Kallir, who granted the artist her first exhibition at his Galerie St. Etienne in 1940. Moses’s old-fashioned presence overlay a core of determined grit that had carried her through a challenging life. Yet the comforting persona captured and soothed the public imagination at a time of endemic national distress in the years following the Great Depression and the onset of World War II. She earned the affectionate moniker Grandma Moses" and became one of the most famous self-taught memory painters of the twentieth century, whose work was published in monographs, reproduced on Christmas cards, and covered in such media outlets as Time magazine. In 1949, she received a special award from President Truman. And, in 1960, as she approached her one hundredth birthday, she was celebrated by Life magazine, and New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, declared "Grandma Moses Day."
There is a disquieting undertone to this snowy scene that evokes the well-known poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost (1874–1963), whose life span is not dissimilar from Moses’s own. A large hearse-like sled with a single male figure diverges along a path that originates from and encircles a center of cheerful activity. Here, the landscape is dotted with the deep green of fir trees, residents stand before their homes, cut firewood, walk dogs, and ride sleds. There are no people on this fork in the road, however. The trees have lost their leaves, and the landscape is spare and unoccupied. The lonely figure seems to be leaving life and all its connections behind on this road "less traveled by."
Stacy C. Hollander, " Dividing of the Ways," exhibition copy for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020. 19471947 1983 10 1 Anna Mary Robertson Moses – known to all as Grandma Moses – was a national phenomenon, charming post –World War II America with her idealized paintings of a rural past. Born in upstate New York in 1860, she attended school sporadically and worked as a hired hand for fifteen years before she married. With her husband, Thomas Moses, she had ten children, of whom five survived. The couple lived briefly in Virginia before settling in Eagle Bridge, New York, the setting for much of Moses’ work. She began to paint while in her sixties; her works, exhibited in a local drugstore, were spotted by a collector who brought them to the attention of the New York art world. Moses quickly became America’s best-known artist – national magazines published interviews with her, and millions came to know her work through greeting card reproductions.
A memory painter, Moses depicted an idyllic past where people worked hard, enjoyed simple pleasures, and lived in harmony. Her approach to painting, however, was businesslike. She collected illustrations to use as source material and assembled a scrapbook of motifs that she repeated throughout her work. Moses’ paintings remain fresh, however, because of her careful composition, sensitivity to color, and painterly technique.
In "Dividing of the Ways," Moses presented the rhythm of rural life with the keen understanding of a countrywoman. While men in the background cut and stack wood, boys with sleds and a man with a dog catch up on their neighbors’ activities by watching two sleighs head off in different directions. Within a deceptively simple white and gray landscape, Moses included many anecdotal details and employed a variety of brushstrokes – from striated sky to almost dry dabs representing snow on the tree branches.
Cheryl Rivers, "Dividing of the Ways," in Stacy C. Hollander, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 373.The third of ten children raised on a farm, Anna Mary Robertson left home at age twelve to work on a neighboring farm, where she met her future husband. The couple married in 1887 and moved to Virginia, where they worked as tenant farmers until 1905, when they had saved enough money to buy their own farm in Eagle Bridge, in upstate New York. She herself gave birth to ten children, of whom five died in infancy. At seventy-five years old, three years after the death of her daughter Anna, she began to paint. “Grandma” Moses was known for her bucolic rural scenes affirming American values, depicted in a naive style. The elderly painter captured the American imagination with her humble origins, hard life, and inspirational determination. She quickly became a national and international celebrity; her work was organized into traveling exhibitions, published in monographs, and reproduced on Christmas cards. In 1949 she received a special award from President Truman. As art dealer Jane Kallir explained: “Facing the harsh realities of the Cold-War era, the public took heart in a real-life tale that seemed to prove the old adage, ‘it’s never too late.’ The media seemingly never tired of repeating Moses’ fairy-tale story. In 1953, she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine; in 1960, Life sent noted photographer Cornell Capa to do a cover story on the artist’s 100th birthday. That birthday—declared ‘Grandma Moses Day’ by New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller—was celebrated almost like a holiday in the nation’s press. . . . Her death was front page news all over America and throughoutmuch of Europe.”
Valérie Rousseau, “Dividing of the Ways,” exhibition label for Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum. Stacy C. Hollander and Valérie Rousseau, curators. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2014. The third of ten children raised on a farm, Anna Mary Robertson left home at age twelve to work on a neighboring farm, where she met her future husband. The couple married in 1887 and moved to Virginia, where they worked as tenant farmers until 1905, when they had saved enough money to buy their own farm in Eagle Bridge, in upstate New York. She herself gave birth to ten children, of whom five died in infancy. At seventy-five years old, three years after the death of her daughter Anna, she began to paint. “Grandma” Moses was known for her bucolic rural scenes affirming American values, depicted in a naive style. The elderly painter captured the American imagination with her humble origins, hard life, and inspirational determination. She quickly became a national and international celebrity; her work was organized into traveling exhibitions, published in monographs, and reproduced on Christmas cards. In 1949 she received a special award from President Truman. As art dealer Jane Kallir explained: “Facing the harsh realities of the Cold-War era, the public took heart in a real-life tale that seemed to prove the old adage, ‘it’s never too late.’ The media seemingly never tired of repeating Moses’ fairy-tale story. In 1953, she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine; in 1960, Life sent noted photographer Cornell Capa to do a cover story on the artist’s 100th birthday. That birthday—declared ‘Grandma Moses Day’ by New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller—was celebrated almost like a holiday in the nation’s press. . . . Her death was front page news all over America and throughout much of Europe.”
Valérie Rousseau, “Dividing of the Ways,” exhibition label for Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum. Stacy C. Hollander and Valérie Rousseau, curators. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2014.Winter snow scene of rural community. Background comprised of hazy sky, mountains and homestead located at right of back scene. Middle ground composed of two homesteads, one to left of winding sleigh trail and one larger complex to right of scene. In foreground of this one vignette are small figures participating in winter activities. Foreground depicts division in sleigh trail with one sleigh with two horses and rider turning off to left of picture, to right of picture a second sleigh and horses with four passengers takes right trail. Two children with small riding sleigh stand watching with backs to viewer. To lower right corner of scene also stands a male viewer with dog.
One of ten children, Anna Mary Robertson Moses was born on a rural farm in upstate New York. Her life was bifurcated between the nineteenth century and the twentieth, encompassing the Civil War, Reconstruction, the dawn of a new century, and two world wars. Informed by this remarkable life, her art is quietly and slyly subversive, representing the founding values of an America that ever existed largely in the mythos of invention and imagination, and hinting at harsh truths that lie beneath the nostalgia.
Robertson was "hired out" at the age of twelve to work for a wealthier family on a neighboring farm. It was here she met Thomas Moses, whom she married in 1887. The couple departed immediately for North Carolina, where Thomas had found work in the New South as manager of a horse farm. The newlyweds never made it further than Staunton, Virginia, where they were enthralled by the richness and majesty of the Shenandoah Valley, which was so different from their hardscrabble lives in New York. They started married life as tenant farmers, but eventually were able to purchase their own farm. Moses gave birth to ten children, only five surviving into adulthood. In 1905, they returned to New York and settled in Eagle Bridge, not far from where Moses was born. Her foray into artmaking was incidental and, as befitting her nineteenth-century roots, began with needlework. In 1932, while tending her daughter Anna who was dying from tuberculosis, Moses began to stitch what she called "worsted" pictures. At the age of seventy-five, when arthritis made it hard for her to hold a needle, she turned to paint.
Moses invented various strategies. She collected illustrations and other printed imagery that became resources for her landscapes, which often are filled with people at various activities associated with rural life. Her paintings were displayed first at county fairs, then exhibited in nearby Hoosick Falls at a woman’s exchange. Through the persistent interest of Louis Caldor, an engineer passing through, they came to the attention of New York gallerist Otto Kallir, who granted the artist her first exhibition at his Galerie St. Etienne in 1940. Moses’s old-fashioned presence overlay a core of determined grit that had carried her through a challenging life. Yet the comforting persona captured and soothed the public imagination at a time of endemic national distress in the years following the Great Depression and the onset of World War II. She earned the affectionate moniker Grandma Moses" and became one of the most famous self-taught memory painters of the twentieth century, whose work was published in monographs, reproduced on Christmas cards, and covered in such media outlets as Time magazine. In 1949, she received a special award from President Truman. And, in 1960, as she approached her one hundredth birthday, she was celebrated by Life magazine, and New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, declared "Grandma Moses Day."
There is a disquieting undertone to this snowy scene that evokes the well-known poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost (1874–1963), whose life span is not dissimilar from Moses’s own. A large hearse-like sled with a single male figure diverges along a path that originates from and encircles a center of cheerful activity. Here, the landscape is dotted with the deep green of fir trees, residents stand before their homes, cut firewood, walk dogs, and ride sleds. There are no people on this fork in the road, however. The trees have lost their leaves, and the landscape is spare and unoccupied. The lonely figure seems to be leaving life and all its connections behind on this road "less traveled by."
Stacy C. Hollander, " Dividing of the Ways," exhibition copy for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020.