Maud Lewis


Maud Kathleen Lewis was a Canadian folk artist from Nova Scotia. Lewis lived most of her life in poverty in a small house in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, achieving national recognition in 1964 and 1965. Several books, plays and films have since been produced about her. Lewis remains one of Canada's best-known folk artists; her works and the restored Maud Lewis House are displayed in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

Early life

Lewis was born Maud Kathleen Dowley on March 7, 1903 in South Ohio, Nova Scotia, the daughter of John and Agnes Dowley. She had one brother. She was born with birth defects and ultimately developed rheumatoid arthritis, which reduced her mobility, especially in her hands. Dowley was introduced to art by her mother, who instructed her in the making of watercolour Christmas cards to sell. She began her artistic career by selling hand-drawn and painted Christmas cards.
Dowley became involved with Emery Allen, also of Digby, who has been described as the love of her life. She gave birth to their daughter, Catherine Dowley, in 1928 out of wedlock. After Allen abandoned Dowley and their daughter, Dowley continued to live at home with her parents. It was arranged by the court for her daughter Catherine to be adopted, as Dowley had no way to support her. Later in life Catherine married Paul Muise and had her own family; they lived in Nova Scotia and Ontario. She apparently tried to contact her mother, but was not successful.
In 1935, Dowley's father John died; in 1937, her mother Agnes died. After living with her brother for a short while, she moved to Digby, Nova Scotia to live with her aunt.

Marriage

Dowley married Everett Lewis, a fish peddler from Marshalltown, on January 16, 1938 at the age of 34. Everett Lewis also worked as the watchman at the county Poor Farm. According to Everett, Maud Dowley showed up at his door step in response to an advertisement he had posted in the local stores for a "live-in or keep house" for a forty-year-old bachelor. Several weeks later, they married.
The two lived in Everett's one-room house with a sleeping loft in Marshalltown, a few miles west of Digby. Maud used this house as her studio; Everett took care of the housework. The pair lived mostly in poverty in the one-room house.
Maud Lewis accompanied her husband on his daily rounds peddling fish door-to-door, bringing along Christmas cards that she had drawn. She would sell the cards for twenty-five cents each. These cards proved popular with her husband's customers, and she began painting. Everett encouraged Lewis to paint, and he bought her her first set of oils.
She expanded her range, using other surfaces for painting, such as pulp boards, cookie sheets, and Masonite. Lewis was a prolific artist and also painted on more or less every available surface in their tiny home: walls, doors, breadboxes, and even the stove. She completely covered the simple patterned commercial wallpaper with sinewy stems, leaves, and blossoms.

Paintings

Lewis used bright colours in her paintings, and subjects were often flowers or animals, including oxen teams, horses, birds, deer, or cats. Many of her paintings are of outdoor scenes, including Cape Island boats bobbing on the water, horses pulling a sleigh, skaters, and portraits of dogs, cats, deer, birds, and cows. Her paintings were inspired by childhood memories of the landscape and people around Yarmouth and South Ohio, as well as Digby locations, such as Point Prim and Bayview. Commercial Christmas cards and calendars also influenced her.
Her paintings are often quite small - often no larger than eight by ten inches, although she is known to have done at least five paintings 24 inches by 36 inches. The size was limited by the extent she could move her arms, which had been affected by arthritis. She used mostly wallboard and tubes of Tinsol, an oil-based paint. Lewis' technique consisted of first coating the board with white, then drawing an outline, and applying paint directly out of the tube. She never blended or mixed colours.
Early Maud Lewis paintings from the 1940s are quite rare. A large collection of Lewis' work can be found in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. The AGNS occasionally displays the Chaplin/Wennerstrom shutters. This collection comprises twenty-two exterior house shutters that Lewis painted in the early 1940s. The work was done for some Americans who owned a cottage on the South Shore. Most of the shutters are quite large, at 5 ft x 1 ft.6 inches. Lewis was paid 70 cents a shutter.
Between 1945 and 1950, people began to stop at Lewis' Marshalltown home on Highway No. 1, the main highway and tourist route in western Nova Scotia. They bought her paintings for two or three dollars each. Only in the last three or four years of Lewis' life did her paintings begin to sell for seven to ten dollars. She achieved national attention as a folk artist following an article in the Toronto-based Star Weekly in 1964. In 1965, she was featured on CBC-TV's Telescope. Two of Lewis' paintings were ordered by the White House in the 1970s during Richard Nixon's presidency. But her arthritis limited her ability to complete many of the orders that had come from her national recognition.
Her paintings have sold at auction for ever increasing prices. On November 30, 2009, A Family Outing sold for $22,200 at a Bonham's auction in Toronto. Another painting, A View of Sandy Cove, sold in 2012 for $20,400. A painting found in 2016 at an Ontario thrift store, Portrait of Eddie Barnes and Ed Murphy, Lobster Fishermen, sold in an online auction for $45,000.

Later life and death

In the last year of her life, Maud Lewis stayed in one corner of her house, painting as often as she could while traveling back and forth to the hospital for treatment of health issues. She died in Digby on July 30, 1970 from pneumonia. Her husband Everett was killed in 1979 by a burglar during an attempted robbery of the couple's house.

Legacy and honours