“Oklahoma’s Grandma Moses” called herself a “memory artist”

An Oklahoma pioneer whose talent for drawing was recognized at the age of five, she later became known as the “prairie painter,” “sagebrush artist,” and “Oklahoma’s Grandma Moses.”

Augusta Metcalfe didn’t like being compared to Grandma Moses and simply called herself a “memory artist.” Whatever her title, Metcalfe became known as one of the great artists of the Southwest, and paintings of Oklahoma scenes hung in many places across the country.

She won many awards for her art and was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1968 at the age of 87. She was born in Kansas in 1881 and came to the uninhabited Oklahoma Panhandle five years later in a covered wagon with her parents Edward and Mary Corson.

To keep Augusta busy during the long journey, her mother had given her paper and a pen and told her to record what she saw.

“Everyone was amazed at the five-year-old’s remarkable resemblance to a horse,” says “Petticoats, Politics and Pirouettes,” a collection of stories about women in Oklahoma from 1900 to 1910.

Her mother, a former teacher, recognized Augusta’s talent and sent examples of her drawings to her brother, a college professor in California. He sent his niece art supplies for several years.

Metcalfe’s mother was the only schooling for the artist, who had never received any formal artistic training. When the Cheyenne-Arapaho land was developed in 1893, the Corsons moved to the area, where each parent claimed a quarter of the land along the Washita River for their own settlement.

When Augusta was old enough, she also claimed a quarter of the property next to her parents’ land. Around 1900, Edward Corson built the stone house that appears in many of Metcalfe’s drawings and was the artist’s home until 1940; she remained on the farm for the rest of her life.

Life was hard for the pioneers in Roger Mills County, especially for Augusta and her mother after Edward Corson died in 1903 and the two women were left to do the housework, plowing and planting the fields, and caring for the livestock.

But Augusta continued painting, and her work won a blue ribbon award at the Oklahoma State Fair in 1911. All of her paintings and drawings captured life as she saw it, much like other historians did with the written word, with pen and paper.

Augusta married James Metcalf when she was 25, but the marriage did not last long. When Metcalf left, Augusta added an “e” to her last name and became the sole manager of the farm while caring for her young son, Howard Metcalfe, and her ailing mother, according to “Oklahoma Living,” published by Electric Cooperatives of Oklahoma.

She continued to receive praise and won blue ribbons at many fairs, but did not earn much money from her art until a solo exhibition in Oklahoma City in 1949.

An article about the “Sage Brush Artist” in Life magazine a year later brought her national attention and created a demand for her work. She also gained fans during World War II when she wrote letters to her son Howard, an Air Corps mechanic stationed in the South Pacific, in which she told picture stories of her life back home with watercolor and pencil sketches.

Sometimes the GIs would spend entire afternoons trying to figure out the meaning of the sketches. The next best thing to getting your own letters from home was the chance to read Augusta’s letters to Howard. Art critics in Oklahoma really took notice after the article on Metcalfe in Life magazine in 1950.

She was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1968 and posthumously into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Hereford, Texas in 1971. A special exhibition of her work is on display at the Metcalfe Museum and her Break O’Day Farm through May 30 as an official Oklahoma Centennial project.

Break O’Day Farm, the historic Metcalfe estate, consists of a modern art facility and a series of historic and reconstructed buildings on 640 acres. It is the only farm in Oklahoma listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Do you like this column? Read all columns in the series “Only in Oklahoma” from the Tulsa World Archive.

“Only in Oklahoma” is a series from the Tulsa World Archive that Gene Curtis, former Tulsa World editor-in-chief, wrote during Oklahoma’s centennial celebration in 2007. The columns told interesting stories from the history of the nation’s 46th state. The Tulsa World Archive is home to more than 2.3 million stories, 1.5 million photos and 55,000 videos. Tulsa World subscribers have full access to all of the archive’s content. Not a subscriber yet? For a limited time, we’re offering a special $1 for three months digital subscription at tulsaworld.com/subscribe.