Anna Mary (Grandma) Moses
Self-taught artist, her wonderful "naive" paintings now hang in prestigious museums, including the Met in New York City, and the Bennington (VT) Museum.
The Departure, by Anna Mary Moses.
An extraordinary story: a hard-working farm woman bears ten children, raises the five that survive, and does heavy farm work until age 70, when she turns to painting pictures for 30 more years.
Anna Mary Moses (1860-1961) was a farm girl in eastern New York State, near Bennington VT.
Later, as a farmer's wife, she did all the heavy, hard work that life on a farm demands, bore 10 children (of whom five lived beyond infancy), yet still found time to paint.
After she was 70 years old and could no longer keep up with the heavy farm work, her paintings took on such a charming and primitive character, and such spirit, that one of her paintings now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
At the age of 100 she was still at work, painting. She died at the age of 101 years.
You can look back into what life was like for her in the exhibit called And Life Is What You Make It in the Grandma Moses Schoolhouse Museum of the Bennington Museum in Bennington VT.
Further reading...