The Moses palette

Moses did not turn seriously to art until after her five children were grown (five others died in infancy) and after her husband, Thomas, died in 1927. She was “discovered’’ by an art collector in 1938 and by the 1950s had become a celebrated figure. In one corner of the gallery, Moses’s 1955 interview with Edward R. Murrow plays continuously. As smoke wafts from the reporter’s cigarette, she chats amiably about making soap and visiting the White House. Meanwhile, visitors lean in close to the paintings to examine the minutiae of rural life that have become icons of a simpler and fancifully sweeter America.

Moses’s rolling rustic landscape owes less fealty to the states of Vermont and New York than to her state of mind. What the gardens of Giverny were to Monet, the farmland west of Bennington was to Moses. A Life magazine story on the occasion of her 100th birthday quoted her as saying, “The country’s changed a lot around here, but the hills look the same as when I used to go slidin’ down them when I was young.’’ Although impatient drivers of trucks and SUVs have replaced wagons and sleighs on the back roads, glimpses of Moses’s world — and her family — remain on a roughly 30-mile loop from Bennington through Eagle Bridge and Hoosick Falls, N.Y.

Start in North Bennington by heading west from the village center on Bank Street. Outside of town, the right-hand fork leads toward White Creek for an instant immersion in Moses farmland. The road becomes CR-68 at the New York state line and undulates for five miles past dairy farms, pastures, and patches of new-growth forest that have reclaimed 19th-century meadows.

Turn left on McCart Road. The farms along this dirt and gravel byway retain a Grandma Moses look, right down to the sentinel-like black locust trees lining the fields. Bennington’s Mount Anthony on the eastern horizon is etched with contour lines just as Moses painted it.