In 2006 a painting called Sugaring Off sold at Christie’s for 1.36 million dollars. Its creator, Anna Mary Robertson Moses, did not take up painting seriously until she was nearly 80 and originally charged three to five dollars a canvas. This episode traces her 101-year life, from her 1860 birth in Greenwich, New York as one of ten children of a farmer and amateur painter, through 15 years as a hired girl scrubbing floors for wealthy neighbors, to decades of farm labor in Virginia and Eagle Bridge, New York. Along the way she made potato chips and churned butter to buy her own cow, gave birth to ten children of whom five survived, and decorated fire boards and quilts with whatever creative energy was left over.

The turn came in her seventies, when arthritis made embroidery too painful and her sister suggested painting instead. She later said painting a gift for the postman was simply easier than baking a cake, and that paint lasted longer than wool because of moths. We follow the 1938 moment when collector Louis J. Caldor spotted her work in a Hoosick Falls drugstore window, the 1939 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, the solo show she skipped in favor of a Thanksgiving forum at Gimbel’s department store, and the marketing explosion that put her images on 16 million Hallmark cards, coffee tins, and the covers of Time and Life.

• The homemade pigments of her childhood, including lemon juice, grape juice, sawdust, grass, and slaked lime on broken dishes
• Her collage method of clipping magazine images to test compositions, and her deliberate erasure of tractors and telephone poles
• Why her flat, elevated perspective echoes Bruegel and the Limbourg brothers without any formal training
• How post-war and Cold War anxiety made her nostalgic scenes a psychological safe haven for millions
• Her friendship with Norman Rockwell, the 1949 honor from President Truman, and the legacy carried on by the Bennington Museum