April 23, 2017

Famous People From Fundy Bay - Maude Lewis

March 7, 1903 - July 30, 1970
Maud Lewis
(Photo;lighthouse.ca)
Born in South Ohio, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Lewis was born Maud Dowley, the daughter of John and Agnes (Germain) Dowley. Lewis lived most of her life in poverty with her husband in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia. She remains one of Canada's best known folk artists.
(Photo;pinterest.com)
Maude with Fluffy at 5-years-old.

She suffered from a result of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. In 1935 Maud's father died and in 1937, her mother followed. As was typical at the time, her brother inherited the family home. After living with her brother for a short while she moved to Digby to live with her aunt. Maud married Everett Lewis, a fish peddler, on January 16, 1938 at the age of 34. According to Everett, Maud unexpectedly showed up at his door step in response to an advertisement he had posted in the local stores looking for a "live-in or keep house" for a forty year old bachelor. Several weeks later they were married. They moved into Everett's one-room house. This house would operate as Maud's studio, where Everett would perform all of the housework.
(Photo;alchetron.com)
Maud 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. These proved popular with her husband's customers as he sold fish door to door and encouraged her to begin painting. Maud accompanied her husband on his daily rounds. She would sell the cards for twenty five cents each. After some success with this, she started painting on various other surfaces such as pulp boards (beaverboards), cookie sheets, and Masonite. Maud was a prolific artist and painted on more or less every available surface in their tiny home. Her house was one-room with a sleeping loft and is now located in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.

It was Everett who encouraged Maud to paint and he bought her her first set of oils. She used bright colours in her paintings and many of her paintings are of outdoor scenes like Cape Island boats bobbing on the water, horses pulling sleigh, skaters, portraits of dogs, cats, deer, birds, flowers, oxen teams and cows.
Most of her paintings are 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. She used mostly wallboard and tubes of Tinsol, an oil-based paint. Maud's technique consisted of first coating the board with white, then drawing an outline and then applying paint directly out of the tube. She never blended or mixed colours.

Early Maud Lewis paintings from the 1940s are quite rare. The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia occasionally displays the Chaplin/Wennerstrom shutters, now part of the Clearwater Fine Foods Inc. collection. This collection comprises twenty-two exterior house shutters that Maud did in the early 1940s. The work was done for some Americans who owned a cottage on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. Most of the shutters are quite large 5 ft x 1 ft.6 inches. Maud was paid 70 cents a shutter.

Between 1945-1950, people began to stop at Maud's home and buy her paintings for two or three dollars. Only in the last three or four years of Maud's life did her paintings begin to sell for seven to ten dollars. She achieved national attention as a result of an article in the "Star Weekly" in 1964 and in 1965 she was featured on CBC-TV's Telescope. Two of Maud's paintings were ordered by the White House in the 1970s during Richard Nixon's presidency. Unfortunately, her arthritis deprived her from completing many of the orders that resulted from the national exposure. In recent years, her paintings have sold at auction for ever increasing prices. Two of her paintings have sold for more than $16,000. The highest auction prices so far is $22,200.00 for lot 196 "A Family Outing". The painting was sold at a Bonham's auction in Toronto on November 30, 2009. Another painting, "A View of Sandy Cove", sold in 2012 for $20,400. A large collection of Maud's work can be found in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

In the last year of her life, Maud stayed in one corner of her house, painting as often as she could while traveling back and forth to the hospital. She died in Digby, Nova Scotia on July 30, 1970.[11] Her husband Everett was killed when a burglar murdered him during an attempted robbery at the house in 1979.

After both their deaths, the painted home began to deteriorate. In reaction, a group of concerned citizens from the Digby area started the Maud Lewis Painted House Society; their only goal was to save this landmark. In 1984, the house was sold to the Province of Nova Scotia and turned over to the care of Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia has restored her original house and installed it in the gallery as part of a permanent Maud Lewis exhibit.
A steel memorial sculpture based on her house has been erected at the original site of her house in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, designed by architect Brian MacKay-Lyons.
A replica of the Maud Lewis House built by retired fisherman Murray Ross, complete with interior was built in the late 1990s and is located a few kilometres north of Marshalltown on the road to Digby Neck.
Maud Lewis is the subject of a book, The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis and three National Film Board of Canada documentaries, Maud Lewis - A World Without Shadows (1976), The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis (1998) and I Can Make Art ... Like Maud Lewis (2005), a short film in which a group of Grade 6 students are inspired by Lewis' work to create their own folk art painting.

In 2009, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in conjunction with Greg Thompson Productions is presenting a new Maud Lewis play on stage at the AGNS. A Happy Heart: The Maud Lewis Story was written and produced by Greg Thompson, the same writer and producer who brought Marilyn: Forever Blonde to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in January 2008. Thompson wrote the one woman play while in Nova Scotia in 2008 and his newest work examines the life and art of Maud Lewis. The play ran until October 25, 2009.

Screenwriter Sherry White wrote a script for a film about Lewis, entitled Maudie. Maudie made its Canadian debut at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was directed by Aisling Walsh, and stars Sally Hawkins as Maud, and Ethan Hawke as Everett Lewis.


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