Mose Tolliver Original Portrait. Medium: House paint on board. Measures 24"x30 3/4"x1/2". Weight 7 pds. PROVENANCE: A Charleston SC Private Estate. Mose Ernest Tolliver (1918/20-2006) was one of the most highly regarded self taught American artists. He began life as the son of a sharecropper and farm overseer on the Rittenour farm in Alabama. He was known as "Mose T", after the signature on his paintings, signed with a backwards "s". Tolliver was born one of 12 children to sharecroppers Ike and Laney Tolliver in the Pike Road community, near Montgomery, Alabama. His exact year of birth is unknown, though it is known he was born on the Fourth of July. He attended school only until the third grade due to a self-described lack of interest in education. In the 1930s, the family moved to Montgomery, Alabama where he helped support his parents and their large family by doing odd jobs. Mose worked "on and off for years" with McLendon Furniture Company in the shipping and delivery area. There in the late 1960's a crate of marble fell from a fork-lift and crushed Mose's left ankle and damaged leg tendons and muscles which left him unable to walk without assistance. A couple of years after the accident and after a period of drunken depression, Mose was encouraged to try oil painting by Raymond McLendon, one of his former employers. An early admirer who brought his work to public attention was Mitchell Kahan, former curator at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. In 1981, the museum mounted a one-man exhibition of Mose's work. In an essay published in the exhibition brochure, Kahan pointed out the element of humor in Mose's work Tolliver's work has been exhibited in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and at the Philadelphia College of Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

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