Growing up on the border of Pennsylvania and Ohio, I am well acquainted with a good country fair – that uniquely rural convergence of rodeo games, fried food, barnyard smells and arts and crafts. Washington DC too is now relishing the American-ness of state fairs by hosting the Great American State Fair in the weeks leading up to the semi-quincentennial. And the Smithsonian American Art Museum has prepared a temporary exhibition celebrating a quintessential American artist who first debuted her works at state fairs in rural New York.

That gallery is Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work, a collection of 88 paintings which will be in DC until July 12, and then heads on tour. It highlights an artist who undeniably shaped our image of the American past – but who never achieved the critical acclaim her commercial success may have anticipated.

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Grandma Moses was an outlier from the outset. She only began painting seriously when she was 78, as the farm work that had shaped her life became more difficult. “If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens,” she joked in her autobiography. She approached painting with a formulaic machinery – how else could she have churned out more than 1,500 paintings in 23 years, right up to her death at 101?

Grandma Moses’s paintings are instantly recognizable because they approach landscapes with........

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