At the age of eighty, a farmer's wife in Cambridge, Virginia, suffered from painful arthritis. The mother of ten children and many grandchildren -- and great-grandchildren -- loved to do needlework, but her fingers could no longer manipulate the large needle to embroider.
The elderly woman looked for something else that would keep her occupied and found she could hold a small paintbrush much easier than a needle. So she tried her hand painting. She thought her farm and country scenes were good enough to show at the Cambridge Fair, but only won prizes for her jams and canned fruit. There were no blue ribbons for her art.
Then one day an art collector from New York City was traveling through the village and noticed several of her paintings for sale in a local drug store. When he showed them to his friends in the art circles of Manhattan, they were more than curious.
Soon, 'Grandma Moses' gained an international reputation. Her widely-collected works of art were featured on calendars, greeting cards and in exhibitions in leading galleries including the Modern Museum of Art in New York.
Even more amazing, twenty-five percent of her 1,500 popular paintings were done after she was 100!
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