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For more than thirty years, Maud Lewis’s art has been something of a guilty pleasure for me. A pleasure because of the riot of her colour, and the eccentricity of her creations. Where else can one find evergreen trees covered in cherry blossoms? Guilty because her way of proceeding as an artist — meeting the demand for her art with a made-to-order product — would seem to go against everything that I have understood about the artist’s calling: to uphold a distinctive and often critical vision of the world in the face of conformity and mercantilism. Since the birth of the modern avant-garde, artists who do otherwise have been understood to be somehow inauthentic. Still today, artists who openly comply with the pressures of the marketplace — whether Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami — are viewed with suspicion.

Maud Lewis made paintings for sale, as her handmade sign on the front of her little roadside cabin at Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, cheerfully announced to the world. Many of her patrons were locals and vacationing summer visitors from Halifax and elsewhere in the Maritimes, and many were travellers from the United States, touring the north shore of Digby County in their cars on the lookout

for Maritime charm. If they wanted black cats, they got black cats — even if the demeanour of those cats was one of muffled outrage. If they wanted pictures of harnessed cattle pulling logs or brightly coloured boats in a harbour, she would willingly make them, working on the little shingle boards that her husband, Everett Lewis, cut for her.

Yet embedded in her obliging artistic practice was a fierce creativity. Maud Lewis made paintings with her customers’ favourite motifs in mind, but she did so with marvellous inventiveness, wringing delightful changes from her homegrown themes. This publication is built around these visual themes, gathering like with like in order to explore her imaginative variety. How many ways could she play with the subject of the covered bridge, or the geometries of boats moored at the dockside? How ever did she manage to develop such a gift for colour as a tool for structuring a scene, whether through the contrast of red versus white, or the ruddy flare of fall colour set again a sea of cobalt blue? Like the Ontario folk artist Mendelson Joe, who makes similarly scaled paintings of his native countryside, Lewis uses a reductive palette that appears simple

Maud Lewis: Paintings for Sale

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at first glance but is in fact pitched to perfection to capture the thrill of clear, impossibly blue-skied Nova Scotia days. Pleasing her buyers was job number one, a necessity for survival, but she did so with a stirring devotion to the specific beauties of her world.

That her work conveys such joy reveals another aspect of her gift: her resilience in the face of a life scarred by loss, isolation, and heartbreak. On March 7, 1903, Maud Lewis was born Maud Dowley to parents John Nelson and Agnes Mary (Germaine) Dowley of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. She enjoyed an uneventful childhood filled with the pleasures of small-town life. Her first experiments in art were with her mother, creating hand-painted postcards and Christmas greeting cards that they sold door to door. Her father was a harness maker and blacksmith in town, and from him she developed a love of the traditional way of life in a region then undergoing rapid modernization. Blacksmiths and harness makers would soon be things of the past in rural Nova Scotia, and she would recall her father’s handiwork in her many paintings of working animals in harness and in her endearing depictions of the blacksmith’s shop.

Looking back, we can see that she was painting a way of life that was fast disappearing, perhaps wilfully obscuring the hardscrabble realities of life in Nova Scotia in her comely rural scenes. But we can also admire her stubborn drive to stay connected to the things that had provided the bedrock for joy in her life: a childhood rich in love and family comfort, enhanced by her close connection to animals and to the beauty of nature.

As time went by, Maud Dowley’s life would take a darker course. Her juvenile arthritis was advancing, increasing her physical deformity as she moved toward adulthood. Her illness was bowing her spine, restricting her neck movements, and crippling her hands. By age nineteen, she was living the life of a recluse with her parents, though she remained at heart an independent spirit. In 1928, she gave birth to a baby girl out of wedlock, the child of a handsome young man named Emery Allen, who quickly skipped town and left her to her own resources. Maud Dowley’s baby was promptly removed from her care and placed with Mr. and Mrs. Alvin Crosby, a couple in Deerfield, Yarmouth County, who took in unwanted children. It appears that the young mother knew

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nothing of her daughter’s life with them, though her father maintained a secret correspondence with the adoptive parents, often sending funds to supplement his granddaughter’s care.

More wrenching changes came with the death of Maud Dowley’s father in 1935, and her mother’s two years later. First, she was sent to live with her brother Charles, a rather unfeeling brute of a sibling, and then to the town of Digby to live with her aunt Ida, a kindly woman, yet one who subscribed to the importance of propriety and restraint in young ladies.

Seeking to slip from these confines, Maud Dowley famously answered an advertisement placed in the local paper by Everett Lewis, a local labourer and fish peddler who lived alone in a cabin at Marshalltown. Showing up on foot at his doorstep, she offered her services, soon explaining that while she would not work for him as a single woman under conditions that would raise eyebrows — local authorities knew him to be a somewhat lecherous and shifty character — she would marry him. On January 26, 1938, after a brief courtship, she took his name. As it turned out, their marriage lasted until her death from pneumonia in 1970, at age sixty-seven, and

it would be a mixed bag of blessings and curses. In many ways, Everett Lewis would enable her career, serving as her salesman in their cabin by the roadside (offering bouquets of sweet peas to her summer clients), preparing her boards for painting, and keeping her accounts, while also supplying firewood for the stove in winter and cooking meals as she became more and more incapacitated. Sadly, Everett Lewis also hoarded the money she made in jars buried in the garden, and for years refused her the amenities of heat and running water despite her fruitful industriousness.

Many views have been offered as to why Maud Lewis disavowed her daughter, Catherine, when she attempted to make contact with her mother in 1950. Lewis responded to the young woman on her doorstep by saying that her visitor was mistaken: her child had been a boy and had died at birth. This response to Catherine’s visit remains a mystery, with key questions still unanswered. We do not know how quickly Catherine was taken from her mother all those years earlier, or if she even knew her baby’s sex, though Maud Lewis’s father certainly did. Had John Dowley told his daughter that her

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baby was a boy and had died? Knowing of Everett Lewis’s exploitative and miserly ways, one wonders, too, if he might have urged her disavowal in order to protect his own financial stake in her art and legacy. Maybe she simply had no desire to retread a path that had brought such pain in her earlier days, reviving memories of her abandonment by Catherine’s father. Or perhaps motherhood itself did not appeal.

Whatever the reason, Maud Lewis drove on, never looking back on the sufferings of her past, ignoring to the best of her abilities the adversities of her present. In her later days, she enjoyed her share of little triumphs: a visit from Nova Scotia premier Robert Stanfield, a feature on the CBC’s Telescope, an article in Toronto’s Star Weekly. She made her own way forward, and her paintings stand as a testament to her creative ingenuity and strength of character.

Today, Maud Lewis continues to have her advocates. This exhibition has been made possible through the enormous generosity of two leading Nova Scotian supporters of her art, Alan Deacon and John Risley, the latter having assembled

the remarkable collection of CFFI Ventures Inc. Obligingly, they have permitted us to borrow liberally from their holdings for our display at the McMichael and have shared with us their knowledge of and passion for the artist. We are grateful to Mollie Cronin, who provided invaluable assistance during this exhibition’s development. Thanks also to lenders Bryan J. Rice, Terra Nova Fine Art Inc., Laura and Brad Freeman, and to Carlyn Moulton of Oeno Gallery who helped us locate several key works in the exhibition. Finally, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s chief curator, Sarah Fillmore, has shown great solidarity in allowing us to borrow numerous works usually kept on view in their Maud Lewis galleries, where the artist’s restored Marshalltown cabin remains on permanent display. Their devotion to Maud Lewis and her legacy is inspiring, and we are delighted to be in cahoots as we do our part to widen the audience for the work of this remarkable woman.

Sarah MilroyChief Curator McMichael Canadian Art Collection

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Trawlers at Dock, n.d.

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The Docks Pier, Bear River, n.d.

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Untitled (Digby Ferry Passing Point Prim Lighthouse), 1950s

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Lighthouse and Gulls, n.d.

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