Grandma Moses Folk Art Tempera Painting "King Church," 1952
Item Details
Anna Mary Robert “Grandma” Moses (American, 1860 – 1961)
King Church, 1952
Tempera painting on masonite
Signed to lower left
Auction label to verso
Includes artist copyright card to verso
Provenance
Christie’s, New York, Important American Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture, May 25, 1994 lot # 159
Grandma Moses, (Anna Mary Robertson) lived a simple rural life that was reflected in the folk art paintings that she became famous for late in her life. She left home at the age of twelve to work on a neighboring farm, married Thomas Moses in 1887, and after a period working in Virginia, settled with her husband onto their own farm in Eagle Bridge, New York. It wasn’t until after she retired from farm life and the death of her husband in 1927 that she devoted herself to painting. She began creating primitive narrative works that portrayed the simple life she had known. Her career was launched in 1938 when Louis Caldor, a collector from New York, happened upon her paintings in a local pharmacy. The following year her works were included in the exhibit Contemporary Unknown Painters at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and shortly after Otto Kallir, a Manhattan gallerist, produced her first solo show titled What a Farm Woman Painted. Grandma Moses’ celebrity grew, spurred by her charming, forthright personality, and her work that celebrated an idealized way of American life that was rapidly disappearing, eventually earning her a place as a cultural icon.
Her original paintings are held in many distinguished institutions including: the Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont; the Brooklyn Museum, New York City; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C; the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, and many others.
Condition
- painting was professionally cleaned along upper edge; minor dust accretions to surface; minor staining to surface, concentrated to upper margin; faint abrasions throughout the composition; signs of frame abrasions to outer margins; minor markings to lower left; handling stains to upper left; minor overpainting to areas of white and blue pigment; minor wear to frame; wear, adhesive accretions and abrasions to verso; examined with UV light.
Dimensions
- measures frame; board measures approximately 24" W x 18" H.
Item #
ITMG730835
