Daily Art Fixx

1. Catherina van Hemessen - Born in 1528 in Antwerp, Belgium.  Van Hemessen trained under her father Jan Sanders van Hemessen and eventually helped him with his commissions as well as receiving her own.  Her 1548 painting “Girl at the Spinet” is thought to be the earliest surviving self-portrait of an artist at work.

Creating mainly portraits, Van Hemessen’s subjects were often seated and were usually set against a dark or neutral background. There are no known works after 1554 after her marriage to Cathedral organist Chrétien de Morien. Van Hemessen died in Antwerp around 1587.

2. Paula Modersohn-Becker – Born on February 8, 1876 in Dresden-Friedrichstadt, Germany, Modersohn-Becker was one of the most important representatives of early expressionism. Women, motherhood and nature were frequent themes in Modersohn-Becker’s paintings. Her images consisted of thickly applied paint with forms that were rough and angular with bold outlines.

Sadly, Modersohn-Bercker’s career lasted just seven years. During that time, she produced more than 700 paintings and 1,000 drawings. On November 20, 1907, shortly after the birth of their daughter Mathilde, Modersohn-Becker died from an embolism.  She was 31 years old.

3. Jenny Holzer – Born in 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio, Holzer is an American conceptual artist known for LED sculptures. Holzer studied at Ohio University, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Before she began working with text art, Holzer was an abstract artist, focusing on painting and printmaking.

As well as LEDs, Holzer also works with other media including bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches and footstools, stickers, T-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, sound, video, light projection and the Internet. “Her works often speak of violence, oppression, sexuality, feminism, power, war and death. Her main concern is to enlighten, bringing to light something thought in silence and was meant to remain hidden.”

In 1990, Holzer became the first woman to design the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale and won the country prize for her work.

4. Lee Krasner – Born on October 27, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York, Krasner was an influential abstract expressionist painter and the wife of Jackson Pollock. From 1928-32, she studied at The Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design in New York, and worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943. In 1937, she took classes with Hans Hofmann, whose influence directed Krasner’s work toward neo-cubist abstraction.

In 1941, Krasner met Jackson Pollock and the couple married four years later.  “During their marriage, she neglected her own artistic work, though she never regarded herself as inferior or dependent on Pollock”.  From 1946–47,  Krasner began to produce her first mature work, the “Little Image” series. “Three groups of Little Images emerged, all-over staccato dabs, thinly skinned, dripped linear networks and rows of tiny runic forms.

From 1953-55, Krasner moved into the medium of collage.  She pasted large shapes cut from her own and Pollock’s discarded canvases in her works. Her admiration for Henri Matisse is shown in these and later works.

After Pollock’s death in 1956, Krasner created her most memorable paintings – “large gestural works generated by whole body movement. From 1959 to 1962, she poured out her feelings of loss in explosive bursts of sienna, umber and white. By the mid-1960s, she began painting lushly coloured, sharply focused, emblematic floral forms, taking a more lyrical and decorative Fauvist-inspired approach. During her last period of activity, the mid- to late 1970s, she returned to collage.”

Lee Krasner died in 1984 at the age of 75. Her will established the Pollock–Krasner Foundation whose purpose is to help artists in need.

5. Niki De Saint Phalle – Born on October 29, 1930 in  Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, France, Saint Phalle was a French sculptor, painter, and film maker. After the stock market crash in 1930, the family moved to New York.  From 1948-49 de Saint Phalle worked as a model, appearing in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and on the cover of Life Magazine.

“De Saint Phalle is best known for her over-sized figures which embrace contradictory qualities such as good and evil, modern and primitive, sacred and profane, play and terror. Her exaggerated “earth mother” sculptures, the Nanas, playfully explore the ancient of feminine deities while celebrating modern feminism’s efforts to reconsider and revalue the woman’s body. In recent years de Saint Phalle made monsters and beasts into architectural forms for playgrounds and schools. These works demonstrate her deep interest in architects like Antoni Gaudi, who made organic fluid buildings incorporating wild fantasies and everyday objects.”

Near the end of her life, and after more than 20 years of work, De Saint Phalle’s sculpture garden, called Giardino dei Tarocchi, (Tarot Garden) opened in 1998.  Niki de Saint Phalle died on May 21, 2002 at the age of 71 in La Jolla, California.

Sources: 50 Women Artists You Should Know, Wikipedia (Becker), Wikipedia (Holzer), Stuart Collection (de Saint Phalle),  Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, Wikipedia, MoMA (Krasner),

1. Beatrix Potter – July 28, 1866- December 22, 1943 – Born in South Kensington in London, England,  Potter is best known for her  illustrated children’s books. She was an author, illustrator, mycologist, farmer, and conservationist. In  her 20s, Beatrix developed into a talented naturalist. She studied plants and animals at the Cromwell Road museums and learned how to draw with her eye to a microscope.

In her thirties, Potter published the highly successful children’s book, “The Tale of Peter Rabbit”. She began writing and illustrating children’s books full time and became financially independent of her parents

Potter died on 22 December 1943, and left almost all of her property to the National Trust. She wrote and illustrated a total of 28 books, including the 23 Tales, the ‘little books’ that have been translated into more than 35 languages and sold over 100million copies.  Her stories have been retold in various formats including a ballet, films, and in animation.

2. Kiki Smith – Born on January 18, 1954, in Nuremberg, Germany and raised in South Orange, New Jersey, Smith studied at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut from 1974 – 1976.   “Since 1980, Smith has produced a variety of work including sculpture, prints, installations and others that have been admired for having a highly developed, yet sometimes unsettling, sense of intimacy in her works’ timely political and social provocations. These traits have brought her critical success.”

The Kitchen in New York hosted Smith’s first solo exhibition in 1982. She has exhibited annually from 1982 at the Fawbush Gallery in New York.  In 1990, Smith received significant acclaim for her exhibition in the Projects Room at the Museum of Modern Art. “By manipulating everyday materials such as glass, ceramic, fabric and paper, Smith’s work examined the dichotomy between the psychological and physiological power of the body.”

Smith has also had major solo showings at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (1990), Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts (1992), Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (1995), Museum of Modern Art in New York (2003), and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2006).

In 2009 Smith was awarded the Brooklyn Museum Women In The Arts Award. She currently lives and works in New York.

3. Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun – April 16, 1755 – March 20, 1842 – Born in Paris, France, Vigée-Le Brun is recognized as one of  Europe’s foremost portrait painters of the eighteenth century.

At the age of 15, Vigée-Lebrun was earning enough money from her portrait painting to support herself, her widowed mother, and her younger brother. For a decade she was Marie Antoinette’s favorite painter. European aristocrats, actors, and writers were also her patrons and she was elected a member of the art academies in 10 cities.

Vigée-Lebrun married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, a painter and art dealer who helped her gain access to the art world. In 1783, Marie Antoinette appointed her a member of Paris’s Royal Academy. As one of only four female academicians, Vigée-Lebrun enjoyed a high artistic, social, and political profile.

With the onset of the French Revolution Vigée-Lebrun fled France with her nine year old daughter. For  the next 12 years she was commissioned to create portraits of the most celebrated residents of Rome, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Berlin.  Vigée-Lebrun returned permanently to France  in 1809.

Scholars estimate that Vigée-Lebrun produced more than 600 paintings. Her memoirs were published in 1835-37 and have been translated and reprinted numerous times.

4. Judith Leyster – July 28, 1609– February 10, 1660 – Born in Haarlem, Netherlands, Leyster was a Dutch Golden Age painter. She was one of three significant women artists of this period. Little is known of Leyster’s early training but the degree of professional success she achieved was remarkable for a female artist of her time. By 1633 she was the first woman admitted to the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke and in 1635 she is recorded as having three students.

“Stylistically, much of Leyster’s work resembles that of Frans Hals. She favored the same types of subjects and compositions, notably energetic genre scenes depicting one or two figures, often children, engaging in some kind of merrymaking. In addition to these compositions, Leyster also painted still lifes.”

In 1636 Leyster married fellow artist Jan Miense Molenaer, and moved to Amsterdam, where the couple lived until 1648. She painted very little after her marriage. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the early works of Leyster and her husband, as they often shared studio props and models, and may have worked on each other’s pictures.

5. Remedios Varo – December 16, 1908-October 8, 1963 – Born in Anglés, near Girona, Spain, Remedios Varo is often overlooked as an important surrealist painter. Varo studied art in Madrid and moved several times between Paris and Spain where she met and exhibited with other leading Surrealist artists. In 1941, Varo and her husband Benjamin Péret fled the Nazi occupation in Paris and moved to Mexico City where many other Surrealists had sought exile. Her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Galería Diana in 1955 was a great success and earned her international recognition.

Varo’s palette consisted mainly of somber oranges, light browns, shadowy grays and greens. Her paintings were carefully drawn, and depicted stories or mystic legends. She often painted heroines engaged in alchemical activities. Varo was influenced by artists such as Francisco Goya, El Greco, Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Braque, pre-Columbian art, and the writing of André Breton. She also borrowed from Romanesque Catalan frescoes and medieval architecture, mixed nature and technology, and combined reality and fantasy to create paintings that defied time and space. Varo was also influenced by a variety of mystic and hermetic traditions. She was interested in the ideas of C. G. Jung and the theories of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Helena Blavatsky, Meister Eckhart, and the Sufis.  She was also fascinated with the legend of the Holy Grail, sacred geometry, alchemy and the I-Ching. She saw in each of these an avenue to self-knowledge and the transformation of consciousness.

Sources: DAF-Varos, Wikipedia-Potter, V&A Museum-Potter, Wikipedia-Vigée-Le Brun, National Museum of Women in the Arts,  MoMA – Smith, Wikipedia-Smith, Wikipedia – Leyster, National Gallery of Art – Leyster

1.  Artemisia Gentileschi - July 8, 1593–ca. 1656: Born in Rome, Italy, and influenced by Caravaggio, Gentileschi is considered to be one of the most accomplished painters of the early Baroque period.  She was trained by her father and well known artist Orazio Gentileschi as well as artist Agostino Tassi.  Tassi raped the 18 year old Artemisia and promised to marry her but was eventually arrested. Tassi’s trial received a great deal of attention, and negatively affected her reputation, prompting her to move to Florence where she had a successful career.

As a result of her experiences, the heroines in Gentileschi’s paintings,  depict powerful women enacting revenge on malicious males. Her style was influenced by dramatic realism and strong contrast of light and dark.

At a time of a male dominated art world, Gentileschi was the first female painter to be accepted as a member of the Acadamia di Arte del Disengo in Florence, Italy. She was also one of the first female artists to paint historical and religious themes, a skill thought to be beyond the intellectual abilities of women.

2.  Judy Chicago – July 20, 1939: Born Judy Cohen, Judy Chicago is an American artist (sculpture, drawings, paintings), author, feminist, and educator, whose work and life are “models for an enlarged definition of art, an expanded role for the artist, and a woman’s right to freedom of expression”.

Between 1974 and 1979, with the participation of hundreds of volunteers, Chicago created her most well-known work, “The Dinner Party“. The  multimedia project, a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization, has been seen by more than one million viewers during its 16 exhibitions held at venues in six countries.

Chicago has a Bachelor and Masters of Art from the University of California Los Angeles.  She has received numerous awards, and has honorary doctorates from Duke University, Lehigh University, Smith College, and Russell Sage College.  Chicago’s work is housed in the collections of major museums including: The British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Getty Trust, Los Angeles County Museum of Art,  National Museum of Women in the Arts,  and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

3.  Julia Margaret Cameron – June 11 1815 –  January 26, 1879: Born in Calcutta, India to a British official of the East India Company and the daughter of French aristocrats, Cameron was educated in France but returned to India in 1838 and married jurist Charles Hay Cameron. The couple moved to London in 1848 where they were aligned with the elite circles of Victorian society.

Cameron did not take up photography until the age of 48, when her daughter gave her a camera as a gift. She enlisted friends and family for her photographs and used an artistic approach that differed from the commercial studios of the time – an approach for which she was often criticized.

Known for her closely framed portraits and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works, some of Cameron’s subjects include Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and others.

Cameron’s photographs, particularly her closely cropped portraits, had a significant impact on the evolution of modern photography. As well, her portraits of major historical figures, are often the only remaining photographs and record of the time. She was meticulous in registering her photographs with the copyright office and kept detailed records which is why many of her works survive today.

4.  Elizabeth Catlett Mora – April 15, 1915: Born in Washington, D.C., Catlett graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C.in 1935, where she studied design, printmaking and drawing. In 1940, she studied under painter Grant Wood and sculptor Henry Stinson and became the first student to receive an M.F.A. in sculpture from the State University of Iowa .

In 1947, Catlett married Mexican artist Francisco Mora, and made Mexico her permanent home.  In 1958, she became the first female professor of sculpture and head of the sculpture department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, School of Fine Arts, San Carlos, in Mexico City where she continued to teach until her retirement in 1975.

Catlett is best known for her abstract wood and stone sculptures of archetypal African American women. She is also an accomplished printmaker and has produced lithographs and linocuts that celebrate the heroic lives of African American women.

Catlett’s work reflects a social and political concern that she shares with the Mexican muralists. Using her art to bring awareness to causes including the African-American experience and the plight of the lower classes, many of her works illustrate the diverse roles of women as mothers, workers, and activists.

Catlett has received many awards including the Women’s Caucus For Art and has an honorary Doctorate from Pace University, in New York.  She is represented in numerous collections throughout the world including the Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico, National Museum of Prague, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum, NY.

5. Berthe Morisot – January 14, 1841 – March 2, 1895: Born to a prosperous family in Bourges, Cher, France, Berthe Morisot was encouraged at an early age to become an artist and studied with neoclassical painter Geoffroy-Alphonse Chocarne.

Characteristic of Impressionist art, Morisot painted her daily experiences and reflected 19th century cultural expectations of her gender and class. Her works include landscapes, family and domestic life, portraits, garden settings and boating scenes.

Morisot worked with pastels and watercolors and oil, and experimented with lithography and drypoint etching in her later years. She first exhibited at the Salon de Paris in 1864 at the age of 23 and continued to show there regularly until 1873, just prior the first Impressionist exhibition.

Morisot grew to be a key member of the group of Impressionists. Her home was a meeting place for painters and writers including Renoir, Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Stéphane Mallarmé. She participated in the Drouot sale of 1875, where the artists were greatly criticized. Her paintings, however, were purchased at slightly higher prices than those of Renoir, Monet, and Sisley.

Undervalued for over a century, she is now considered among the finest of the Impressionist painters.

Sources:Artemisia Gentileschi.com, Met Museum, Wikipedia, Judy Chicago.com, Met Museum, MoMA, Wikipedia, Cleveland Museum of Art, Wikipedia

Read more 5 Women Artist You Should Know posts.

1.  Laura Wheeler Waring – May 16, 1887 – Feb. 3, 1948: Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Waring attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1914. Waring was awarded the Cresson Traveling  Scholarship and studied Expressionism and Romanticism at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris.

Much of Waring’s work was focused on portraiture though she also painted still life and landscapes.  She was among the first artists displayed in the United State’s first all African American art exhibit that was held in 1927 by the Harmon Foundation – an organization that promoted the work of African American artists, writers, educators and scientists. In 1943, the Harmon Foundation commissioned Waring to paint the series “Portraits of Outstanding American Citizens of Negro Origin”, which included W.E.B. DuBois, George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson, and James Weldon Johnson.

From the late 1920’s until her death in 1948, Warren worked as an art instructor and director of the art and music departments at Pennsylvania’s Cheyney State Teachers College (now Cheyney University).

2. Georgia O’keeffe - Nov 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986: Considered to be a pioneer of American modernism, O’keeffe was born in Wisconsin and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905 and at the Art Students League in New York in 1907.

From 1908-1910, O’keeffe worked as a commercial artist in Chicago for a few years and then moved to Charlottesville in 1910 with her family, where she studied drawing at the University of Virginia. In the following eight years, O’Keeffe studied art and art education, taught art, traveled, and worked on developing her unique style – a blend of symbolism, abstraction, and photography with subjects including cityscapes, landscapes, figure studies, and flower paintings.

After 1929, O’keeffe she spent most summers painting in New Mexico and moved there permanently in 1949. She worked in pencil and watercolor until 1982 and then in clay from the mid-1970s to 1984 due to her failed eyesight. O’keeffe received numerous awards, including the American Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Arts.

3.  Elaine Fried de Kooning – March 12, 1918 – Feb. 1, 1989: Born in Brooklyn, NY, de Kooning was a successful painter, sculptor, draughtswoman, printmaker, writer, and wife of fellow artist Willem de Kooning. She studied in New York at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, the American Art School, the Academy school, and with Willem de Kooning.

De Kooning was interested in both figurative and abstract art, acknowledging the influence of her husband and of the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School. Her first solo exhibition occurred at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1952 and she presented almost annually at numerous institutional and commercial galleries throughout the United States.

Portraits were an important part of De Kooning’s output, though she never considered them to her main focus as a painter. When producing portraits, she worked on several canvases at the same time, creating three or more versions of the same portrait.

While her artistic reputation was somewhat overshadowed by her husband’s fame, de Kooning was able to establish a name as an artist and as an art critic. As well, she taught at numerous institutions including Bard College, University of Georgia, University of Pennsylvania, University of California at Davis, in New York at the Cooper Union, Parsons School of Design, and Pratt Institute, and others.

4. Louise Bourgeois – December 25, 1911: Born in Paris, Bourgeois is perhaps best known for her spider sculptures titled “Maman”. She initially studied mathematics at the Sorbonne in 1932 but left to study art instead. In the mid to late 1930s, she studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, École du Louvre, Atelier Fernand Léger, and other schools in Paris.

Bourgeois married American art historian Robert Goldwater, and in 1938, moved to New York where she studied for two years at the Art Students League. Bourgeois began her career as a painter and engraver, turning to wood sculpture in the late 1940’s.

In the mid 1950’s Bourgeois’ artwork explored issues such as internal distress, fear, vulnerability, and loss of control. She worked with bronze, plaster, and marble, and her previous rigid, upright sculptures evolved into smooth, organic shapes. In the 1960’s Bourgeois’ works became larger and were executed in bronze, carved stone, and rubber latex. During this time, she explored relationships between men and women in her artwork which became more sexually explicit.

Bourgeois’s achievements have been recognized with numerous honours and awards including National Medal of Arts and a grand prize in sculpture from the French Ministry Culture.  At the age of 97, she currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

5.  Sonia Delaunay – Nov. 14, 1885 – Dec. 5, 1979: Born Sarah Stern (nicknamed Sonia), in the Ukraine, Delaunay moved to St. Petersburg at the age of five to live with a wealthy uncle, taking his surname, Terk. She studied art in Karlsruhe, Germany and in Paris in 1905, where she would live most of her life.

Delaunay married French painter Robert Delaunay with whom she had a son, Charles. Both Sonia and Robert developed an offshoot of cubism known as Orphism (aka Simultaneism). Orphism was similar to cubism in its abstraction but was based on the real world and used bright colours and repeating patterns similar in some aspects to Russian folk art.

Delaunay was a prolific artist working in many mediums. Throughout her career, she created paintings as well as public murals, theatrical, graphic, fashion, and interior designs, and designs for playing cards, ceramics, mosaics, and stained glass.

Delaunay received numerous awards for her work and in 1964 became the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre. In 1975 she was named an officer of the French Legion of Honor.

***Read the first installment of 5 Women Artists You Should Know***

Sources: PBS, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum,  National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, Guggenheim, National Museum of Women in the Arts

In my quest to learn more about the history of women and the visual arts, I have decided to begin a monthly series called “5 Women Artists You Should Know”.   This series will contain short overviews about each artist, however, it is my intention to write more in-depth posts about each artist individually in the coming months.  So without further ado, here are the first five artists.

1. Frida Kahlo – July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954. Born in  Coyoacán, Mexico, Kahlo survived many difficult events in her life. She began to paint while recovering in bed from a bus accident in 1925 that left her disabled. Although she made a partial recovery, she was never able to bear  children, had numerous miscarriages, and underwent 32 operations before her death. Her paintings, mostly self-portraits, deal directly with her health and physical challenges. Kahlo was influenced by indigenous cultures of Mexico and European influences including Realism, Symbolism, and Surrealism.

Kahlo’s work was not widely recognized until years after her death. She was often remembered only as artist Diego Rivera’s wife. It was not until the early 1980s, when the artistic movement in Mexico known as Neomexicanismo began, that she became very prominent.

2. Mary Cassatt – May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926. Known for her depictions of women and children, Cassatt was one of the few active American artists in 19th century French avant-garde. The daughter of a prominent Pittsburgh family, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She traveled throughout Europe,  settling permanently in Paris in 1874. In that year she exhibited at the Salon and in 1877 met Degas, with whom she maintained a close relationship. His art and ideas had a strong influence on her own work though she did not imitate his style. He introduced her to the Impressionists and she participated in several exhibitions between 1879 – 1886.

While in France, Cassatt sent paintings back to exhibitions in the United States that were among the first impressionist works seen in the US. By advising wealthy American patrons on acquisitions, she also played a vital role in forming some of the most important collections of impressionist art in America.

3. Emily Carr – December 13, 1871 – March 2, 1945. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Carr moved to San Francisco in 1890 to study art after the death of her parents. In 1899 she traveled to England to study at the Westminster School of Art in London and other studio schools in England. In 1910, she spent a year studying art at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, France before moving back to British Columbia permanently.

Carr was strongly influenced by the landscape and First Nations cultures of British Columbia and Alaska. She did not receive recognition as an artist until she was 57 years of age.  In the 1920s she came into close contact with members of the prominent Group of Seven (artists) after being invited by the National Gallery of Canada to participate in an exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern. She maintained a close relationship with the group and was included in their exhibitions.

Emily Carr is a Canadian icon.  The fact that she was a woman challenged by the obstacles that faced women of her day, to become an artist of such originality and strength has made her a “darling of the Women’s Movement”.

4. Annie Leibovitz – October 2, 1949 – present.  Born in 1949 in Connecticut, USA Leibovitz studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. She became interested in photography  when she lived in the Philippines, where her father was stationed during the Vietnam War with the Air Force.

Leibovitz began photographing for Rolling Stone magazine in 1969 while still a student in San Francisco. Famous for her iconic images of celebrities, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in 1983 she became chief photographer for Vanity Fair. A regular contributor to Vogue as well, she is the winner of numerous awards and her work has been exhibited around the world. In addition to her portraiture, she has also photographed battered women, and the conflicts in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Rwanda. In 2005, American Photo named her the single most influential photographer working today.

5. Anna Mary Robertson Moses – September 7, 1860 – December 13, 1961. Born in a farming community in Greenwich, N. Y, “Grandma Moses” began painting in her seventies after leaving a career in embroidery due to arthritis. A self-taught, renowned folk artist, Moses painted mostly scenes of rural life. In the years directly after World-War-II, Moses was one of the most successful and famous artists in America, and possibly the best known American artist in Europe.

Her simple realism and nostalgic subject matter with which she portrayed farm life and the rural countryside, gained her a large following. She was a prolific painter and during her lifetime she created more than 1,000 paintings.  Moses received honorary doctoral degrees from Russell Sage College in 1949 and from the Moore Institute of Art, Science and Industry, Philadelphia, in 1951.

Sources: MOMA, Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Webmuseum Paris, Canadian Encyclopedia, Art History Archive, Contact Press Images, Wikipedia, New York Times