Mose Tolliver was born into a family of twelve children; his parents were sharecroppers. At the age of forty, he had his legs crushed by falling slabs of marble. Invalid, to combat boredom, sitting on his bed he began to paint. He used recovered wooden planks but also various objects (guitars, chairs, boxes, etc.) as a support for painting his landscapes, animals, portraits and erotic figures. He signed “Mose T” with an inverted āSā.