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Lot Essay
Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known as Grandma Moses, remains one of the most recognized and beloved American painters. She began painting in earnest in 1927 at the age of sixty-seven on her farm in upstate New York. She initially gave her paintings to family and friends and showed them at fairs along with her jams and preserves. Then in the spring of 1938, her works were noticed by collector Louis Caldor in the window of a local drugstore. Caldor returned to New York City determined to introduce Moses to the art world. After two years, Caldor finally captured the interest of gallery owner Otto Kallir. Kallir later remembered, "what struck me...was the way the artist handled the landscape...Though she had never heard of any rules of perspective, Mrs. Moses had achieved an impression of depth [with color]...creating a compelling truth and closeness to nature." (as quoted in K.A. Marling, Designs on the Heart: The Homemade Art of Grandma Moses, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006, pp. 126-27)
In 1940, at the age of eighty, Moses had her first New York exhibition, What a Farm Wife Painted, at Kallir's Galerie St. Etienne. The show was well received, and her works were seen as a welcome respite to the reductive Modernist art of the day. One critic wrote, "When [Moses] paints something, you know right away what it is—you don't need to cock your head sideways like when you look at some modern dauber's effort and try to deduct [sic] if it is maybe a fricassee or sick oyster, or maybe an abscessed bicuspid, or just a plain hole in the ground." (as quoted in J. Kallir, Grandma Moses in the 21st Century, Alexandria, Virginia, 2001, p. 23) During a time of great patriotism during World War II, Modern art was still seen as a European influence, while Moses’s paintings seemed wholly American.
The Old Checkered House in 1860, painted in June of 1944, is a classic example of Moses’s all-American subject. The checkered house, located in a town not far from her farm, was originally an inn built in the 18th century and as Moses described, “It was the Headquarters of General Baum in the revolution war [sic], and afterwards He used it as a Hospital, then it was a stoping [sic] place for the stage, where they changed Horses every two miles, oh we traveled fast in those days.” (as quoted in O. Kallir, ed., Grandma Moses: American Primitive, 1946, pl. 17)
New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl may have been thinking of The Old Checkered House in 1860 when describing Moses’s paintings, “Her best pictures unfold startlingly expansive landscapes of fields, woods, and hills that slide smoothly into Brueghelesque foregrounds of buildings and teeming figures. She said that she came by her scenic vision in a flash—when the hubcap on a car at her farm caught her eye with a fish-eye reflection of the surrounding, familiar countryside.” (“The Original,” The New Yorker, May 28, 2001)
Moses painted from memory, sometimes aided by photographs and by cutout images. Although the checkered house burned down in 1907, it left a lasting impression on Moses and became a favorite subject among collectors of her works. She painted the distinctive house at least twenty-five times in both summer and winter and in various sizes. The present work is notable as being the second largest of the checkered house paintings. Large format works such as this are rare in Moses’ oeuvre and date mostly to the mid-1940s before the large canvases became too difficult for her to manage.
This work, painted on June 13, 1944, was assigned number 592 by the artist and entered into her record book on page 29.
A color reproduction of the present work was printed and published by Arthur Jaffe Heliochrome, Co., in 1949.
The copyright for this picture is reserved to Grandma Moses Properties, Co., Inc., New York.
In 1940, at the age of eighty, Moses had her first New York exhibition, What a Farm Wife Painted, at Kallir's Galerie St. Etienne. The show was well received, and her works were seen as a welcome respite to the reductive Modernist art of the day. One critic wrote, "When [Moses] paints something, you know right away what it is—you don't need to cock your head sideways like when you look at some modern dauber's effort and try to deduct [sic] if it is maybe a fricassee or sick oyster, or maybe an abscessed bicuspid, or just a plain hole in the ground." (as quoted in J. Kallir, Grandma Moses in the 21st Century, Alexandria, Virginia, 2001, p. 23) During a time of great patriotism during World War II, Modern art was still seen as a European influence, while Moses’s paintings seemed wholly American.
The Old Checkered House in 1860, painted in June of 1944, is a classic example of Moses’s all-American subject. The checkered house, located in a town not far from her farm, was originally an inn built in the 18th century and as Moses described, “It was the Headquarters of General Baum in the revolution war [sic], and afterwards He used it as a Hospital, then it was a stoping [sic] place for the stage, where they changed Horses every two miles, oh we traveled fast in those days.” (as quoted in O. Kallir, ed., Grandma Moses: American Primitive, 1946, pl. 17)
New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl may have been thinking of The Old Checkered House in 1860 when describing Moses’s paintings, “Her best pictures unfold startlingly expansive landscapes of fields, woods, and hills that slide smoothly into Brueghelesque foregrounds of buildings and teeming figures. She said that she came by her scenic vision in a flash—when the hubcap on a car at her farm caught her eye with a fish-eye reflection of the surrounding, familiar countryside.” (“The Original,” The New Yorker, May 28, 2001)
Moses painted from memory, sometimes aided by photographs and by cutout images. Although the checkered house burned down in 1907, it left a lasting impression on Moses and became a favorite subject among collectors of her works. She painted the distinctive house at least twenty-five times in both summer and winter and in various sizes. The present work is notable as being the second largest of the checkered house paintings. Large format works such as this are rare in Moses’ oeuvre and date mostly to the mid-1940s before the large canvases became too difficult for her to manage.
This work, painted on June 13, 1944, was assigned number 592 by the artist and entered into her record book on page 29.
A color reproduction of the present work was printed and published by Arthur Jaffe Heliochrome, Co., in 1949.
The copyright for this picture is reserved to Grandma Moses Properties, Co., Inc., New York.