Self-Taught Artists

Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College

The eponymous subject matter depicted in Clementine Hunter’s 1965 Baptism is one she repeatedly returned to throughout her career: a baptismal procession at the church near Melrose Plantation in Louisiana, where she worked for most of her life. Though the coloration and composition of her baptism scenes vary, they are consistently structured around a diagonal line of girls following two priests away from a chapel and a lake where Hunter “saw them people go in the water a-many, a-many a time.”

Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses’ 1954 Old Water Wheel, which was painted in the last decade of the artist’s life, depicts the pastoral landscape of the Shenandoah Valley where she lived and farmed with her husband beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains for nearly twenty years. Although they moved back to her home state of New York in 1905, Moses’ late-in-life artistic career was marked by nostalgia for her youth in Virginia, expressed through idyllic landscapes informed by her memories of the South as a place of hard work and ample opportunity.

Like Moses, Sophy Pollak Regensburg did not begin painting until late in life, but she came from a drastically different background as a member of a prominent New York family in the Upper East Side. Regensburg’s oeuvre primarily consists of still life compositions featuring vibrant household objects. In Pear-Notes, three crisply painted pears pop out from a foreshortened windowsill, the intricate patterns of the surrounding curtains reflecting her affinity for textiles as a longtime quilter and needlepointer.