She was near eighty when she picked up the brush, and her hands were already stiff with arthritis. For years Anna Mary Robertson Moses had made her pictures in embroidery yarn, until holding the needle hurt too much, so her sister told her to try paint. She worked with whatever she had. House paint and a piece of leftover board, and she painted the only world she knew. Snow coming down over the farm. The sugaring off. Sleighs on white hills, and the harvest she had worked with her own hands since she was a girl of twelve.

She did it because she liked doing it. Then a collector found her paintings in a drugstore window in Hoosick Falls and bought the whole lot. She had been letting them go for a few dollars, if she sold them at all. She once told a reporter she took up painting because it was easier than baking a cake for the postman's Christmas gift.