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 sai ...