Hand Painted and signed by Mose Tolliver. Small enough size to make a great addition to any collection or to decorate your space. See my other Mose Tolliver paintings! Tolliver was born one of 12 children to sharecroppers Ike and Laney Tolliver[4] 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 as well as between the years 1920-25. [4] 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. In the early 1940s he married his childhood friend, Willie Mae Thomas, and had 13 children, 11 of whom survived to adulthood. [4] During the late 1960s, while working at McLendon’s furniture factory, he had a severe injury where his legs were crushed when a half-ton load of marble shifted and fell from a forklift as he was sweeping in the furniture factory. After this incident, he turned to painting to combat boredom, pain and long hours of idle time. Although many say that his career started after the accident, Tolliver claims he painted beforehand. He would often turn his paintings upside-down and paint the picture of perhaps an animal and landscape positioned from various directions. Tolliver’s titles are wildly divergent; e. “Smoke Charlies, ” “Scopper Bugs, ” or “Jick Jack Suzy Satisfying her own Self”. On October 30, 2006, Tolliver died from pneumonia in Montgomery, Alabama.
