Grandma Moses

A Good Day's Work

Leslie Umberger, Randall R. Griffey

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780691272412
• eBook ISBN: 9780691274461
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

A major reexamination of the life, art, and legacy of a self-taught American master

Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work repositions Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses (1860–1961) as a multidimensional force in American art, whose beloved recollections of rural life earned her a distinctive place in the cultural imagination of the postwar era. Moses was eighty years old when Otto Kallir, a New York art dealer and recent émigré from Nazi-held Austria, introduced her to the world. “Grandma Moses,” as the press dubbed her, quickly became a polarizing figure, beloved by the public yet dismissed by the art world for her story-time scenes and lack of formal training.

Drawing on Moses’s reflection on her own life as “a good day’s work,” the book charts Moses’s creative development from her earliest artistic efforts to the emergence of her signature style, revealing a multidimensional artist who fused direct observation of nature, labor, and personal memories to tell idiosyncratic yet compelling stories. It positions Moses as a central figure in the history of twentieth-century American art, a painter whose life and work bore witness to the Civil War, two world wars, and the civil rights era.

Beautifully illustrated, Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work captures the indomitable spirit Moses brought to her artmaking, conveying a candor and authority that still resonate today with the quest for a homespun American visual tradition.

Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

Exhibition Schedule
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
October 24, 2025–July 12, 2026

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Lenders to the Exhibition
• Director’s Foreword
• Picturing an American Artist: Introduction
• “A Beautiful World”: The Life and Art of Grandma Moses
• The Moses Family in Virginia: 1887–1905
• The Artist and Her Gallerist
• Catalogue of Works
• “A Good Day’s Work”: Grandma Moses, Rural Life and Labor, and Modern American Art
• Grandma Moses and the American Landscape
• Age, Race, and Memory: Grandma Moses’s Postwar Appeal
• Modern Farmhouse: Reframing the Past-Oriented Painting of Grandma Moses
• Bibliography
• Index
• Image Credits