If there’s anything as American as “Mom and apple pie”, it’s the legacy of Grandma Moses. Her life and art made her an iconic figure of 20th Century Americana.
The following are a few of her memorable quotatons:
“I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.” TIME magazine, Vol. 52 (1948)
“I’ll get an inspiration and start painting; then I’ll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live.” From her obituary in The New York Times, 14 December 1961 issue.
“Painting’s not important. The important thing is keeping busy.” New Leaves (1986) by Louise Matteoni
“I paint from the top down. From the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then the cattle, and then the people.” Tampa Bay Magazine (January/February 2008), p. 205
“A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.” Grandma Moses, American Primitive : Forty Paintings (1947) by Otto Kallir
“If I hadn’t started painting, I would have raised chickens.” Grandma Moses, American Primitive : Forty Paintings (1947) by Otto Kallir
Grandma Moses started her painting career at the age of 78.
A descendant of Mayflower Compact co-signer Stephen Hopkins (1581 – 1644), iconic American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell and Anna enjoyed a friendship both as fellow artists and neighbors. They resided within proximity of one another across from the New York-Vermont border.
What do you call a craft that transports human beings to strange and alien worlds? A spaceship? The U.S. Starship Enterprise?
This is the story of a Dutch immigrant and his family who were passengers on the Dutch West Indies ship de Vergulde Bever (The Gilded Beaver) on its fifth voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Holland to New Amsterdam in 1661. The ship successfully sailed the route six times from 1656 through 1664.
On 11 May 1661 Frans Jacobszen van Oudewater (1632 – 1665), his wife Geertruid Gerrits, and their two small children, Thys and Maritje, boarded de Vergulde Bever from its anchorage in the Zuiderzee. The next day the fully laden ship, including bags of sail-mail, with fifty-one passengers aboard set sail for New Amsterdam. Seventy-eight days later, the ship entered New York Harbor and dropped anchor off the coast of the southern tip of Manhattan, or the area of land that now known as Battery Park.
A new era for Frans and his descendants commenced the day when the twenty-nine-year-old and his family set foot on New Netherland soil and greeted by Petrus Stuyvesant, 7th and Last Director-General of New Netherland. Later that same year his second son, Thomas Franzen Oudewater, was born; he was baptized on Christmas Day in Albany (Fort Orange at the time).
The ship’s manifest lists Frans and his family as hailing from Beest, Gelderland, Holland—most of the other passengers were similarly noted. However, they instead came from Oudewater, which is a town located in the province of Utrecht. The cause of the controversy likely stems from the sponsorship of Beest-originating passengers. In fact, Dominie Gideon Schaets (1607- -1694), who came to America in 1652 from Beest to serve as an ordained minister of the Reformed Dutch Church, sponsored the passengers’ voyage to America. This sponsorship practice remains the obvious reason his future parishioners listed on the ship’s manifest were deemed to have originated from Beest. Furthermore, Frans’ descendants adopted the surname Oudewater* or Outwater to denote, as was customary then, that part of Holland from which they originated.
Having clearly discovered one of the reasons Frans embarked on the perilous journey to America, that is, to freely practice his religious beliefs, we can only surmise another important motivation was to share in the bounty that America offered him as a young man with a wife and children to support. Moreover, the opportunity to own and develop his land as he saw fit must have been foremost in his mind even though he may have indentured himself for a number of years as recompense for the cost of his passage to New Amsterdam. What is clear is that owning land of any significant value in Holland may not have been a possibility for him.
Sadly, Frans’ dream died with him when he passed away from an unknown cause less than five years after his landing in New Amsterdam. His wife promptly remarried in May 1665. She survived him for fifteen years.
At the age of nineteen, his daughter Maritje married Johannes Hendrick Spier. She bore him ten children and died at the age of sixty-four. Her youngest brother Thomas Oudewater, from whom I’m almost a direct descendant, fathered eight children with his first wife Tryntje Jans Bresteede. On 16 June 1686, the couple married in New York City. He lived to be ninety-two years of age. Tryntje passed away when she was only forty years old. Thys Oudewater lived for only forty-eight years and fathered only one child towards the end of his life.
However sorry we may feel about Frans’ early demise his dreams for a new life for himself and his family lived on through his descendants. And we can trace many Dutch-Americans of historical note to some part of his or her lineage to him. His dependency chart clearly demonstrates this claim.
It’s important to note the direct involvement of New Amsterdam settlers in the development of constitutional democracy. The seminal act came about in reaction to widespread, social discontent, verging on chaos, extant after the ruinous Kieft’s War (1643 – 1645). In reaction, West India Company Director-General Willem Kieft appointed an eight-man panel comprised of leaders community to assist him in governance. Ironically, the citizen council later succeeded in petitioning the States-General of the Netherlands to replace him. (Anne Hutchinson (1591 – 1643) and her children were massacred during the initial stage of the war.)
Soon thereafter the council morphed at the hands of Adriaen van der Donck into the Council of Nine, which succeeded in establishing a representative government independent of the West India Company. Though short-lived as a result of the British conquest of the colony in 1664, a representative government comprised of mainly common folk was as a political force to be reckoned.
Thereafter the American-Dutch community flourished primarily as a result of ad hoc representative government business communities that they first established to facilitate commerce and trade, especially in rural areas situated well away from New York. The early beginnings of the development of the American system of jurisprudence also took root in these rural communities that continued to eschew the English common law standard in favor of the Dutch prosecutorial justice system after the fall of New Amsterdam.
Another aspect of representative government, that is religious freedom, that stands today as a hallmark of modern democracy nearly perished in infancy during the latter history of New Amsterdam. Not so ironically, however, in 1657, the Amsterdam-based directorate of the Dutch Indies Company overruled Director-General Peter Stuyvesant after he decided to ban religious freedom. In the company’s management mind, this was not a good way to promote their business ventures, particularly because they desperately needed fresh supplies of new immigrants to exploit from all walks of religious creed, including theretofore persecuted Quakers and Jews.
The New Amsterdam experience would form the basis not only for the Constitution of the United States but also for democracies that later developed in Europe and other parts of the world. There is simply no precedence in modern history to refute that claim prior to the advent of the Dutch New World culture. More than three and a half centuries later, newly emerging democracies utilize the social contract template their society pioneered and developed to govern themselves. It’s plain to me that Thomas Jefferson embraced these principles as set out to draft the Declaration of Independence.
During the Revolutionary War, Frans’ descendants fought on the side of the Continental Army. Captain John (Jan) Outwater (1746 – 1823) commanded the Bergen County Militia Regiment as Regimental Commander from the time it was first mustered in 1777 until the end of the war. After the war, he became one of America’s first judges and New Jersey Assemblymen (he’s credited with introducing the first American suffrage legislation). His cousin Dr. Thomas Outwater served with distinction as a battlefield surgeon.
Recommended reading: The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto (ISBN13: 9781400078677)
NOTES
Oudewater (Old Water) was the birthplace of Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609). He was born slightly before John Calvin died and was actually taught by Calvin’s son-in-law. He held the position of professor of theology at the University of Leiden from 1603 until his death. Arminius founded the Remonstrant movement that refuted the Reformed Dutch Church predestination doctrines. It’s probable that the movement later influenced Spinoza and Adriaen van der Donck.
Arminian theology factored in the reign of King Charles I (1625 – 1649), brother of King James II (1633 – 1701) , the last absolute monarch of England. His perceived affinity with the movement led Puritans to ever greater efforts to supplant his rule with parliamentary government. After the King’s beheading, Oliver Cromwell (1599 – 1658) , a self-styled Puritan, assumed the position of 1st Lord Protector of the short-lived Commonwealth. The Arminian movement took root in England with the founding of the Methodist Church in 1844 by Marijke Meij-Tolsma.
Considered by art historians as the first Dutch Master oil painter, Aelbert van Ouwater (1444 – 1475) hailed from Oudewater. Two of his paintings hang in the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and one, Raising of Lazarus, in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Spaniards took Raising of Lazarus back to Spain as war booty after the bloody siege of Haarlem in 1573. (The Oxford Dictionary of Art by Ian Chilvers)
What do you call a craft that transports human beings to strange and alien worlds? A spaceship? The U.S. Starship Enterprise?
This is the story of a Dutch immigrant and his family who were passengers on the Dutch West Indies ship de Vergulde Bever (The Gilded Beaver) on its fifth voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Holland to New Amsterdam in 1661. The ship successfully sailed the route six times from 1656 through 1664.
On 11 May 1661 Frans Jacobszen van Oudewater (1632 – 1665), his wife Geertruid Gerrits, and their two small children, Thys and Maritje, boarded de Vergulde Bever from its anchorage in the Zuiderzee. The next day the fully laden ship, including bags of sail-mail, with fifty-one passengers aboard set sail for New Amsterdam. Seventy-eight days later, the ship entered New York Harbor and dropped anchor off the coast of the southern tip of Manhattan, or the area of land that is now known as Battery Park.
A new era for Frans and his descendants commenced the day when the twenty-nine-year-old and his family set foot on New Netherland soil and were greeted by Petrus Stuyvesant, 7th and Last Director-General of New Netherland. Later that same year his second son, Thomas Franzen Oudewater, was born; he was baptized on Christmas Day in Albany (Fort Orange at the time).
The ship’s manifest lists Frans and his family as hailing from Beest, Gelderland, Holland—most of the other passengers were similarly noted. However, they instead came from Oudewater, which is a town located in the province of Utrecht. The cause of the controversy likely stems from the sponsorship of Beest-originating passengers. In fact, Dominie Gideon Schaets (1607- -1694), who came to America in 1652 from Beest to serve as an ordained minister of the Reformed Dutch Church, sponsored the passengers’ voyage to America. This sponsorship practice remains the obvious reason his future parishioners listed on the ship’s manifest were deemed to have originated from Beest. Furthermore, Frans’ descendants adopted the surname Oudewater* or Outwater to denote, as was customary then, that part of Holland from which they originated.
Having clearly discovered one of the reasons Frans embarked on the perilous journey to America, that is, to freely practice his religious beliefs, we can only surmise another important motivation was to share in the bounty that America offered him as a young man with a wife and children to support. Moreover, the opportunity to own and develop his land as he saw fit must have been foremost in his mind even though he may have indentured himself for a number of years as recompense for the cost of his passage to New Amsterdam. What is clear is that owning land of any significant value in Holland may not have been a possibility for him.
Sadly, Frans’ dream died with him when he passed away from an unknown cause less than five years after his landing in New Amsterdam. His wife promptly remarried in May 1665. She survived him for fifteen years.
At the age of nineteen, his daughter Maritje married Johannes Hendrick Spier. She bore him ten children and died at the age of sixty-four. Her youngest brother Thomas Oudewater, from whom I’m almost a direct descendant, fathered eight children with his first wife Tryntje Jans Bresteede. On 16 June 1686, the couple married in New York City. He lived to be ninety-two years of age. Tryntje passed away when she was only forty years old. Thys Oudewater lived for only forty-eight years and fathered only one child towards the end of his life.
However sorry we may feel about Frans’ early demise his dreams for a new life for himself and his family lived on through his descendants. And we can trace many Dutch-Americans of historical note to some part of his or her lineage to him. His dependency chart clearly demonstrates this claim.
It’s important to note the direct involvement of New Amsterdam settlers in the development of constitutional democracy. The seminal act came about in reaction to widespread, social discontent, verging on chaos, extant after the ruinous Kieft’s War (1643 – 1645). In reaction, West India Company Director-General Willem Kieft appointed an eight-man panel comprised of leaders community to assist him in governance. Ironically, the citizen council later succeeded in petitioning the States-General of the Netherlands to replace him. (Anne Hutchinson (1591 – 1643) and her children were massacred during the initial stage of the war.)
Soon thereafter the council morphed at the hands of Adriaen van der Donck into the Council of Nine, which succeeded in establishing a representative government independent of the West India Company. Though short-lived as a result of the British conquest of the colony in 1664, a representative government comprised of mainly common folk was a political force to be reckoned with.
Thereafter the American-Dutch community flourished primarily as a result of ad hoc representative government business communities that they first established to facilitate commerce and trade, especially in rural areas situated well away from New York. The early beginnings of the development of the American system of jurisprudence also took root in these rural communities that continued to eschew the English common law standard in favor of the Dutch prosecutorial justice system after the fall of New Amsterdam.
Another aspect of representative government, that is religious freedom, that stands today as a hallmark of modern democracy nearly perished in infancy during the latter history of New Amsterdam. Not so ironically, however, in 1657, the Amsterdam-based directorate of the Dutch Indies Company overruled Director-General Peter Stuyvesant after he decided to ban religious freedom. In the company’s management mind, this was not a good way to promote their business ventures, particularly because they desperately needed fresh supplies of new immigrants to exploit from all walks of religious creed, including theretofore persecuted Quakers and Jews.
The New Amsterdam experience would form the basis not only for the Constitution of the United States but also for democracies that later developed in Europe and other parts of the world. There is simply no precedence in modern history to refute that claim prior to the advent of the Dutch New World culture. More than three and a half centuries later, newly emerging democracies utilize the social contract template their society pioneered and developed to govern themselves. It’s plain to me that Thomas Jefferson embraced these principles as set out to draft the Declaration of Independence.
During the Revolutionary War, Frans’ descendants fought on the side of the Continental Army. Captain John (Jan) Outwater (1746 – 1823) commanded the Bergen County Militia Regiment as Regimental Commander from the time it was first mustered in 1777 until the end of the war. After the war, he became one of America’s first judges and New Jersey Assemblymen (he’s credited with introducing the first American suffrage legislation). His cousin Dr. Thomas Outwater served with distinction as a battlefield surgeon.
Recommended reading: The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto (ISBN13: 9781400078677)
NOTES
Oudewater (Old Water) was the birthplace of Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609). He was born slightly before John Calvin died and was actually taught by Calvin’s son-in-law. He held the position of professor of theology at the University of Leiden from 1603 until his death. Arminius founded the Remonstrant movement that refuted the Reformed Dutch Church predestination doctrines. It’s probable that the movement later influenced Spinoza and Adriaen van der Donck, who was a University of Leiden graduate.
Arminian theology factored in the reign of King Charles I (1625 – 1649), brother of King James II (1633 – 1701), the last absolute monarch of England. His perceived affinity with the movement led Puritans to ever greater efforts to supplant his rule with parliamentary government. After the King’s beheading, Oliver Cromwell (1599 – 1658), a self-styled Puritan, assumed the position of 1st Lord Protector of the short-lived Commonwealth. The Arminian movement took root in England with the founding of the Methodist Church in 1844 by Marijke Meij-Tolsma.
Considered by art historians as the first Dutch Master oil painter, Aelbert van Ouwater (1444 – 1475) hailed from Oudewater. Two of his paintings hang in the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and one, Raising of Lazarus, in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Spaniards took Raising of Lazarus back to Spain as war booty after the bloody siege of Haarlem in 1573. (The Oxford Dictionary of Art by Ian Chilvers)
Gerrit Gerritsen van Oudewater was one of the Dutch “Sea Beggar Chiefs” in the liberation war against Spain. (The Sea Beggars; Liberators of Holland From the Yoke of Spain by Dingman Versteeg, pp. 86-87).
**”Oudewater-Outwater, Van Breesteede, Bertholf-Bartholf, Le Sueur-Lozier, Van Borsum, Caudebec-Cuddeback-Cudeback, and the Provoost Lineage of Dr. Samuel Outwater of Lockport, N. Y., and Los Angeles, Cal.”, New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, Vol. LV, No. 4, October 1924, pgs. 349-368 (pgs. 360-361 inclusive).
He and many of his contemporary libertarian scientists, such as Bertrand Russell and Benjamin Spock, M.D. , played a pivotal leadership role during the 1960s civil rights and peace movements. They also lent ethical credibility and moral substance to the leadership of those causes.
The ideas of John Maynard Keynes, seen here around 1940, had great influence over the economic policies that followed the Great Depression and World War II.
Both towering figures in the field of post-classical economics (literally as well as John was 6’6″ tall and Ken Galbraith at 6’8″), their combined influence on socialist economic government advocacy cannot be underestimated. Keynes is still considered the father of macroeconomics and its leading initial advocate, Ken’s version, which he adopted and later revised to his own fashion, influenced governmental economic policy-making almost to the same degree with quasi-efficacy in the long run, arguably more importantly than him in the post-WWII economic scenario after John’s demise.
John valiantly tried to persuade F.D.R. to scrap the New Deal (1933 – 1939) and instead adopt his macroeconomic vision of how to treat the Great Depression. Tragically, WWII ultimately forced Roosevelt’s hand as the U.S. government raised capital through the massive debt funding to finance the war effort, which later brought about a sustained period of economic prosperity to the U.S. and its allies.
Due to the high level of inflation and markedly reduced output demand, stagflation during the late 1970s all but canceled its efficacy. Keynesian economics as the primary driver of economic growth. Reaganomics largely overcame the malaise by implementing pro-enterprise investment policies. As a result, the stock and bond markets flourished for several decades. It was also a period of relatively sustained economic growth. As a highly successful investor and trader, Lord Keynes would likely have applauded the success of Reaganomics, though Ken had cause to continually condemn it no matter what.
Tycho Brahe, though understandably errant in his scientific assessment of the helio-solar relationship between the Earth and Sun, was nevertheless responsible for supplanting astrology with his new-found field of astronomy in developing the first scientific methodology for describing the cosmology of planets and stars with scientific instrumentation he first invented. What’s more remarkable than that he was a naked-eye astronomer before the invention of the telescope in the Netherlands seven years after his death.
The Patricians Genealogical Research Foundation 