The idyllic locale pictured in many of Moses' paintings is the land surrounding her home in upstate New York near the Vermont border.

"She painted what she saw and intimately knew, and the beauty which radiates from her work is the natural result of her vision," writes Otto Kallir, author of Grandma Moses, a comprehensive overview of one of America's most celebrated folk artists.

Born in 1861, Moses did not begin painting until she was in her 70s. At age 80, only two years after several of her works were bought from a local pharmacy by an art collector, Moses had her first one-woman exhibit in New York City. She quickly gained fame and popularity for her paintings of rural farm life.

Painting the "Promised Land"

Although Moses' works are known for depicting the 19th century, they also impart a sense of place.

"I think she loved the landscape," said Ruth Levin, registrar at the Bennington Museum in Vermont, which houses a permanent exhibit of Moses' work. "She always remembered what the hills and farms around her looked like."

Moses spent most of her 101 years near her birthplace of Greenwich, New York, a small town between the Hudson River and the Green Mountains of Vermont.

A large portion of Moses' work includes patchworks of field and forest common to the area. The background of many of her paintings shows the rolling hills of what is now known as "Grandma Moses Country."

Despite their rural locale, Moses' paintings are rarely without people or buildings—Moses' landscapes are domesticated. The wild animals of upstate New York—foxes, rabbits, raccoons—are eschewed in favor of farm animals. Horses are shown within fences and tethered to carriages. Land that was once forest is tilled and separated by fences.

"The world of Grandma Moses is bright and serene; man is in perfect harmony with nature," writes Kallir.

"Grandma Moses' Garden"

On Moses' 100th birthday, Jean Cassou, former director of Paris' Musée National d'Art Moderne, praised Moses, saying that she "upholds the rights of nature."

"She would have us know that there is still a bit of paradise left on this earth," he wrote, "and that art may reach out as far as it will with its most advanced branches, because it is deeply rooted in the rich soil of Grandma Moses' garden."

Since Grandma Moses' "discovery" in 1940, she has received the attention—and approval—of critics around the world. Several of the works in the National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibit, Grandma Moses in the 21st Century, are on loan from a Tokyo, Japan, museum.

The 87 works in the exhibit will travel around the United States, with stops in Florida, Alabama, Oregon, California, Oklahoma, and Ohio.

The National Museum for Women in the Arts' exhibit Grandma Moses in the 21st Century will be on display in Washington, D.C., until June 10, 2001.