Calhoun

Close up of Calhoun

Bucolic landscape rendered in a naive, folk-style of painting. The horizontal composition features a patchwork of yellow and green fields on rolling hills set against a blue-gray sky. In the foreground study farm buildings surround small figures tending to the land.
Bucolic landscape rendered in a naive, folk-style of painting. The horizontal composition features a patchwork of yellow and green fields on rolling hills set against a blue-gray sky. In the foreground study farm buildings surround small figures tending to the land.
Grandma Moses, Calhoun, 1955; Oil on pressed wood, 16 x 24 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay; © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York

Grandma Moses’s bucolic landscapes with sturdy farm buildings, rolling hills, and small, simply rendered figures evoke a world that existed primarily in her imagination. She felt strongly that art should present only pleasant scenes and subjects, asking, “What’s the use of painting a picture if it isn’t something nice?”

Calhoun depicts workers bringing in the hay from fields, a favorite subject among Moses’s many harvest scenes. The title may refer to Calhoun County, West Virginia, not far from the farm in Virginia where Moses and her family lived around the turn of the last century.

A self-taught artist, Moses adapted landscape compositions from greeting cards, magazine clippings, photographs, prints (such as Currier and Ives), or she imagined scenes from stories she had read.  She described painting outdoors as “impracticable” and focused instead on “whatever the mind may produce.”

Moses developed a tipped perspective that allowed her to give greater attention to the backgrounds of her scenes. In Calhoun, lines of trees and neat hedgerows laid out in a quilt-like pattern extend toward the top of the painting. The work’s yellow-green tonality is characteristic of many paintings by the artist; she often created several works at once, using the same palette of paint in order to economize on materials.

Artwork Details

  • Artist

    Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses)
  • Title

    Calhoun
  • Date

    1955
  • Medium

    Oil on pressed wood
  • Dimensions

    16 3/4 x 24 in.
  • Donor Credit

    Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay
  • Photo Credit

    © Grandma Moses Properties
  • On Display

    No