Six Works to Know by Grandma Moses

Considered one of Grandma Moses’s most iconic and intrinsically American paintings, Bringing in the Maple Sugar shows a recurring theme in her work—“sugaring off,” or converting maple sap into sugar. Farm chores were among her favorite subjects, and here she shows a communal and multigenerational view of this seasonal activity, complete with neighbors transporting firewood and kids waiting for their share of maple candy (made by pouring hot syrup over snow).

Farm life rituals such as this were increasingly disappearing by the time Moses created this work, and she was deemed a sort of memorialist whose paintings visually preserved traditions. Maple sugar also held certain political connotations. During the Revolutionary era, it was a Yankee substitute for the white sugar taxed by the British government. Later, during the Civil War, this “free sugar” from the north was an alternative to the “slave sugar” harvested in the South by enslaved laborers.

At the center of this cheerful farmscape of the Moses farm in Eagle Bridge, New York, we see a woman in a black dress—Moses herself, preparing for her first visit to New York City in November 1940. “There was a request for me to go to the big city, New York, for a Thanksgiving celebration in Gimbels’ auditorium, where they had hung the Grandma Moses pictures,” she recounted later in her autobiography. “Grandma, who had never travelled much—what anticipation and vexation, what commotion and confusion, at last she was on her way!”

Created a few years after the fact and a rare painting in which Moses refers to herself, the work captures the artist at a crossroads between her life as a farmer and her life as an artist with surging fame. In the center of the piece we see scenes of life in Eagle Bridge, such as children playing, sheep grazing, and a man plowing a field. A dirt road transects the composition and ascends into the unknown.

This white and glittery scene shows off Moses’s panoramic style; it also represents her acquiescence to suggestions that she paint a Christmas scene. She wasn’t fond of religious subject matter and generally avoided interiors, but when her gallerist reminded her that Christmas preparations often began outdoors, Moses was inspired to create this painting as a depiction of a popular American ritual. Other holidays she painted included Thanksgiving, Halloween, and the Fourth of July.

When Hallmark included this image on a 1951 greeting card, it was an immediate success. At a time when the materialistic aspect of Christmas was starting to eclipse the holiday’s religious significance, this painting was a reminder of the values of family togetherness, gratitude for nature’s bounty, and anticipation of long-held traditions.

Moses considered the power of Mother Nature to be an inseparable part of its beauty and painted several scenes in which a storm menacingly approaches. Some of these works recall natural disasters such as thunderstorms, blizzards, forest fires, and tornadoes that Moses experienced herself in her rural life in northeastern New York.

These storm paintings illustrate the tension of anticipation: a darkened sky, trees bending in the wind, people preparing, and unsettled horses rearing up (a perceptive touch and a testament to Moses’s understanding of animals and their behavior). Other storm scenes show people continuing their work despite the weather, as if to say, “This too shall pass.” In The Thunderstorm we see both—some look up nervously; others go about their business.

Early in her painting career, Moses established a visual vocabulary of favorite themes including her family’s long history in New York and particularly the lives of her two paternal great-grandfathers, one of whom built the first wagon to travel the Cambridge Turnpike and the other of whom fought in the War of Independence. As part of this historical motif, she painted many versions of Checkered House—a landmark building constructed in 1765 that was the site of a key American victory during the Revolutionary War.

Its distinctive facade had folksy appeal, and its red pattern made it attractive to use in a 1946 ad for DuBarry Lipstick’s “Primitive Red” shade. Moses’s works became popular so quickly partly because of their reproducibility, and they appeared on products such as Hallmark greeting cards, drapery fabric, ceramics, plates, a children’s tea set, trivets, and Spry shortening tins before that type of art merchandising was common. The Checkered House lipstick ad was a turning point that made Moses’s gallerist Otto Kallir realize he had to keep a closer eye on use of her work and limit advertising licenses to products more in line with Moses and her lifestyle.

As Moses’s last completed painting, created after she’d already turned 101, The Rainbow reflects the spectrum of her most beloved subjects: a working farm filled with adults, kids, and animals, all engaged in acts of harvesting and other natural rhythms of life. A prismatic yet fading rainbow spans the painting as an almost spiritual force, while a tree of life stands firmly rooted at the center of the composition.

Moses was unable to paint after completing The Rainbow. After falling several times, she was transferred to a health center in July 1961, where she remained until her death that December, restrained to her bed for safety. The country was swept with grief after her passing, leading President John F. Kennedy to declare, “All Americans mourn her loss.”