It seems like an unassuming home.
Only 15 square metres, and most would call it a shack.
But inside, it is a visual wonderland.
A feast for the eyes.
Visitors feel like they’ve entered a surreal world surrounded by beautiful art.
For 30 years in this tiny home a woman with a hunched back and fingers gnarled like ancient roots, painted. Every wall, from floor to ceiling, was a canvas.
Black cats, tulips, butterflies, birds and everything she saw from her window was captured in her unique style.
Tourists and locals could walk away with one of her pieces for a dollar or two.
And eventually her artwork even made it to the White House.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today I’m sharing the story of a beloved folk artist from Nova Scotia.
This is…. Maud Lewis
From the moment she entered the world in South Ohio, Nova Scotia on March 7, 1903, life was difficult for Maud Dowley
She was born to John and Agnes Dowley, and it was clear that something wasn’t quite right.
She had been born with almost no chin and at the time no one knew what she had.
As she grew up, she remained much smaller than everyone else her age and very frail.
Maud spent most of her time alone, mostly because she felt uncomfortable being around the other children due to her physical differences which included a curved spine which worsened by the time she was a toddler giving her a bit of a hunchback.
Her hands, which should have been nimble and quick, were like knotted wood and deformed into the tell-tale signs of arthritis.
Based on photographs today it is believed she was born with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a very rare condition that only impacts two out of every 100,000 children.
In the 21st century, her condition would be diagnosed quickly, allowing for immediate treatment which could’ve given her a relatively normal life.
But back in the early-1900s, there was nothing that could be done beyond treating the pain.
Maud spent her happy childhood primarily at her family home with her parents and brother where she learned to play the piano and with her mother’s help she began to draw and paint.
Maud’s mother encouraged her to paint Christmas cards to sell, which sparked her career as an artist.
Her father was a blacksmith, and so the family lived in relative comfort. Not well-off by any means, but a good life.
When Maud was 13, the family moved to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia where they rented a home and her father operated a harness shop.
At the time, her brother Charles, who was four years older, was already working as the manager of the Capitol Theatre and was a gifted musician, who played the saxophone in local bars.
In her mid-teens, her condition worsened causing her to miss school often, which meant she was two years behind.
Not that she was sad about it, going to school would mean being tortured by cutting words as children mocked her appearance.
Even adults were unkind, they would often stare and even made snide comments about her.
She continued to take solace in her art and sold her cards and decorations door-to-door.
By 1928, she was 27 and gave birth to a daughter who she named Catherine.
According to biographer Lance Woolaver, in his book Maud Lewis: The Heart on the Door, the father was a local man named Emery Allen who had abandoned Maud as soon as she became pregnant.
Maud gave Catherine up for adoption and never acknowledged her and life continued on.
Despite the Great Depression, her father was still employed and Maud still lived at home.
But the calm home life was not to last.
In 1935, her father died suddenly.
Two years later, her mother passed.
Everything they owned was left to Charles, leaving Maud with nothing in the will.
For a brief time, she lived with her brother and his wife Gert, but their marriage crumbled the same year Charles and Maud’s mother died.
So, Maud moved to Digby, Nova Scotia to live with her aunt Ida.
Just like before her new home did not last long.
Maud had spent thirty years living with family, and now she was ready to spread her wings.
And it all began by answering an ad in the newspaper.
In the autumn of 1937, Everett Lewis was looking for a live-in housekeeper in Marshalltown, just outside Digby.
He was an illiterate man who was a fisherman, lumberman and farmer.
He had purchased his small home just over ten years earlier and moved in with a team of oxen in 1926.
Now he was at the point that he needed an extra hand and so he put an ad in the paper.
To his surprise it only received one response.
(PAUSE)On a cool autumn morning in 1937 when Everett opened his door and found Maud staring back at him.
He was a man of rough appearance, a miser to say the least, but he was still shocked when he saw there was no car or wagon in his driveway.
She had walked all the way from Digby, 10 kilometres away.
Everett looked at the woman and didn’t think she would make a good housekeeper.
He drove her to a nearby railroad underpass and dropped her off so she could walk the rest of the way home.
But then a few days later, Everett heard another knock at his door.
When he opened it, the same contorted woman was standing in front of him.
It wasn’t love at first sight, or at second but what we know is that they soon fell in love and on Jan. 16, 1938, Everett Lewis married Maude Dowley, and she moved into the little house by the highway to begin her new life.
The single room home was only six feet tall which forced visitors to stoop when they walked in.
The attic was a sleeping loft. Two windows on the main floor let in light, while another window was in the loft.
The home was bare-bones to say the least.
With little insulation a cook stove kept them warm in the winter.
Electricity and running water was a luxury that would never be part of this home.
The toilet facilities were an outhouse in the yard, and bathing was done with a wash basin or small tub filled from the well, with water heated on the stove.
On their wedding day Maude was thirty-six years old (although she claimed to be thirty-four), and she had little to bring to the marriage.
She had no land or other possessions, and no money from her family.
She was physically unable to do the sort of job outside the home that would have been normal for working-class women.
Her parents had passed, and she was estranged from her brother, she had been left to the charity of her aunt.
While she had grown up in relative comfort and lived a decent life free from the most extreme poverty that was all about to change.
Now she lived far below the poverty line, and it helped fuel what she had mostly abandoned as an adult.
Her art.
Although they met because Everett was looking for a housekeeper, Maud’s physical condition prevented her from doing most work around the house, so Everett did it, while she painted.
Her marriage to Everett introduced her to a world of poverty and a community of rural labour.
Everett sold fish door-to-door and Maud often accompanied him and sold cards at five cents each.
The price had not changed since she did the same with her mother 20 years earlier.
Before long, the painted cards were more popular than the fish. In 1939, Everett was hired as a night watchmen at the nearby Poor Farm.
No longer doing rounds with her husband, Maud began selling her little paintings directly out of their home.
Through the 1940s, she expanded her range and began painting pulp boards, clam shells, dustpans and cookie sheets.
Then she turned to the large canvas all around her: her home.
Over the next two decades, she painted every single surface from the floor to ceiling.
And I’m not just talking about the walls.
Her artwork covered the doors, shutters, breadboxes and even the stove.
Visitors left surprised that the unassuming house was a kaleidoscope of art.
They were greeted by painted stems, leaves, cats, birds and blossoms, all brought to life by the woman sitting in the corner holding the brush like a small bird holding a feather.
All her paintings featured bright and happy colours of the natural world.
Maud Lewis’s skies were always blue.
There was never rain, nor grey days. If there was snow it was fresh and new with nary a footprint touching disturbing the surface.
If humans found their way into her paintings, they were enjoying the outdoors in sleighs, on skates or on boats.
Maybe that sounds like another artist you may have heard of?
Perhaps the man with the afro who told us there are no mistakes, just happy little accidents?
But years before Bob Ross was telling us about “happy little clouds”, Maud Lewis was painting them.
Her art featured no interiors or cities.
One visitor, Sally Tufts said years later,
“I was fascinated by how small the house was and amazed that every inch was painted in bright colours.”
Maud was painting the world she could not truly enjoy.
The happy shinny world she created was the escape from a body that held her captive.
By 1945, word had spread of the folk artist in Nova Scotia.
People began to stop by her home to buy pieces. Along the highway, a simple sign read quote.
“Paintings
For Sale
M. Lewis” end quote
Visitors were greeted by a cheerful woman happy to see others enjoy her pieces which she sold for a few dollars each.
Most of the paintings were not large, measuring only 60 centimetres by 90 centimetres, about half the size of an average window.
She had no formal training, and her works have often been described as child -like, with the added sophistication of realism and impressionism.
Sometimes she would paint a winter landscape with trees in autumn colours, or pine trees with flowers blooming on the needles.
The surrealism came from the fact that she hadn’t seen much of the world as she was held captive by her body. She said in an interview,
“I imagine I’m painting from memory; I don’t copy much. I just have to guess my work up cause I don’t go nowhere, you know. I can’t copy any scenes or nothing. I have to make my own designs up.”
Art critics called her work primitive.
Some said it as an insult, others as a compliment to the new and emerging folk artist unconstrained by the trends of the era.
But Maud Lewis just painted things that made her happy, and she wanted others to feel happy too.
One American couple in the late-1940s asked her to paint the 22 exterior shutters of their South Shore cottage. The shutters were brought to her, each measuring 300 centimetres by 38 centimetres. She painted them for 70 cents a shutter.
Sometimes people bought art as an act of charity.
Journalist Sandra Phinney wrote her mother would stop by Maud’s house, buy some paintings for two dollars and take them home.
Her mother had no interest in the art; she just wanted to help a neighbour.
The paintings never hung on the wall, instead they were burned in the fireplace. Phinney estimates her mother burned $100,000 in collectible art… but I’m getting ahead of myself…. because we’re not there yet Maud was still relatively unknown outside Nova Scotia though her legend was growing.
Despite doing very little promotion people seemed to always be pulling over to her little home to buy art.
Two of her biggest supporters were Claire Stenning and Bill Ferguson, the owners of the Bedford art gallery.
They showcased Maud’ work and did their best to increase her exposure.
Stenning and Ferguson tried to get Maud to charge more for her paintings, but she refused.
She worried that charging too much would destroy the market and tourists would no longer stop by.
As customer demand increased, she painted the same types of artwork repeatedly.
She said in a CBC interview quote.
“I put the same things in, I never change. Same colours, same designs”
Cats were always her favourite subjects, and her feline friends were featured in hundreds of paintings.
And as she continued to paint Nova Scotia’s best kept secret refused to remain hidden for much longer.
In February 1964, Cora Greenway interviewed Maud Lewis for her CBC Radio show Trans-Canada Matinee.
A year later in July 1965, the Toronto Star journalist Murray Barnard and photographer Bob Brooks arrived in Digby for a story.
Titled, The Little Old Lady Who Paints Pictures It was published in the Saturday edition of the largest newspaper in the country and called Maud Canada’s answer to Grandma Moses, the American folk artist that started painting in her late-70s.
Soon after, CBC profiled her on the TV program Telescope.
The coverage generated a huge amount of interest in Maud, and she suddenly became the toast of the Canadian art world.
The home was inundated not just with visitors, but with letters from people asking for her paintings.
Demand for her work increased, and Maud did her best to keep up.
Her neighbour, Kathleen MacNeil, became her secretary, answering letters and mailing out paintings.
Even the U.S President Richard Nixon asked for two of Maud’ paintings so her art could be exhibited at the White House.
Possibly worried that the man they called “Tricky Dick” wouldn’t pay her, she wrote to ask for the money up front.
But just as her career was reaching its climax, Maude’s story was nearing its end.
In 1968, Maud fell and broke her hip.
It became the catalyst for a rapid and inevitable decline.
Severely impacted by health issues that had plagued her entire life, she stayed in just one corner of her home where she painted constantly.
Only trips to the hospital interrupted her work and only shortly because while receiving treatments she painted cards for the nurses.
Unable to move Everett pitched in and painted the backgrounds on the Masonite panels and filled in some colours and created cardboard stencils of oxen, cats and covered bridges to make things easier for her.
Despite the fame and rising price for her art, which now sold for five dollars each, the couple remained the same as they had been when they first moved in together. Maud said to CBC quote,
“I would like to have a little more room, to put my paints and stuff. I’d like to have a trailer. I imagine it costs too much for a trailer. I couldn’t afford that.”
As it turned out, Maud ended up getting a trailer when supporters set up a used one beside her home so she could have extra space.
But by then it was too late.
On July 30, 1970, Maud Lewis died from pneumonia.
One of Canada’s most celebrated and beloved artists was gone.
Like so many famous artists, following her death, Maud Lewis’ fame only grew. Her work was in high demand and prices for her paintings soared but suddenly, Everett was left without a steady source of income.
Now well into his senior years, he was unable to fish or work manual labour as he once had.
But since he had some experience as an artist although not as skilled as his deceased wife, Everett decided that if people wanted his wife’s art, he was going to give it to them.\
Everett began to paint forgeries of Maud’ work to fill the demand that seemed to increase with each year.
When he was told that forging his wife’s work was illegal, Everett started to paint original works.
But…those tended to look a lot like Maud’s works as well.
In 1976, he appeared in the National Film Board documentary about his wife, Maud Lewis: A World Without Shadows.
But then just three years later he was gone.
(PAUSE)In 1979, a young man broke into the little house hoping to steal money.
Everett was home.
In the struggle, and Everrett was shot and killed.
After his death it came to light that although Everett was known for being a bit of a miser, he had over $22,000 sitting in a bank account.
And he had hidden mason jars filled with cash throughout the property.
Most estimates at the time of his death his estate was valued at $40,000 or $164,000 today.
[PAUSE]In 2016, Maudie, a film starring Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, was released.
While it took some liberties with the story, most felt it stayed relatively true to the tale of Maud Lewis.
It grossed $1 million on 76 screens and even beat out The Fate of the Furious in Atlantic Canada theatres.
The film also garnered critical acclaim with an 89 percent approval on Rotten Tomatoes and went on to win seven Canadian Screen Awards including Best Motion Picture, and Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor awards for Hawkins and Hawke.
In 2019, Maud Lewis was recognized by the Government of Nova Scotia as its provincial Heritage Day honouree.
One year later, a limited-edition postage stamp series was released featuring her art.
Today, her work hangs in some of the most prestigious galleries throughout North America.
Pieces that once sold for a dollar or two, now sell for thousands of dollars.
Her painting, Black Truck, sold in Toronto in 2022 for a staggering $350,000.
Even Everett’s forgeries sell well, with one going for $2,000 recently.
But you might be wondering what happened to her greatest canvas…. What happened to her beautiful little home?
[TRANSITION]After Everett died, the house fell into disrepair.
Maud’s literal life’s work- was in danger of fading forever and remained abandoned for 5 years until 1984 when her Magnum Opus was sold to the Province of Nova Scotia, who then transferred it into the care of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
The home was disassembled, transported, reassembled and restored completely, as a permanent piece within the art gallery.
Today, visitors can stop in and see the home that gave Maud so much joy during her life.
As she said,
“I’m contented here. I ain’t much for travel anyway. Contented. Right here in this chair. As long as I’ve got a brush in front of me, I’m all right.”
