Birth of Anna Mary Robertson, later known as Grandma Moses, on a farm near Greenwich, New York.
Anna Mary Robertson was born on September 7, 1860, on a farm near Greenwich, New York, into a large rural family that shaped the visual world she would later portray in paint. The third of ten children of Russell King Robertson and Margaret Shanahan Robertson, she grew up in the working life of upstate agriculture, a background that later became the subject matter of her art.
Her birth matters historically because it marks the beginning of the life of one of the most famous American folk artists of the twentieth century. Moses would not begin her artistic career until late in life, but the scenes she painted—farm labor, seasonal rituals, country roads, and community gatherings—came directly from the landscape and domestic rhythms of her early years. In an era when rural women’s labor was often invisible and their creative work rarely preserved, her later success gave enduring cultural form to experiences that might otherwise have remained undocumented. Her long life, spanning from the Civil War era to the dawn of the 1960s, also made her a living link between nineteenth-century agrarian America and modern mass culture.