Meet the woman who painted in a one-room shack and became a national treasure
Born with debilitating arthritis, Maud Lewis became a renowned artist
In 1965, when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) visited the one-room shack where folk artist Maud Lewis lived and worked to do a segment on her vivid, rustic work, the interviewer asked her what her favorite painting was. “My favorite painting?” the diminutive Lewis repeated, a bit incredulous. She paused. “I’ve never seen many paintings from other artists, you know, so I wouldn’t know.”
By that point, she had been painting for at least 28 years, but it’s safe to say the enormously talented Lewis hadn’t really seen much of anything at all. She was born Maud Dowley in rural Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia in 1903. As a result of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, her hands were deformed and her shoulders hunched. She had trouble lifting her chin. Tired of being mocked by her classmates, Lewis dropped out of school after the fifth grade. When her parents died, she lived with her brother — he’d inherited the family home and eventually sold it, but chose not to share the proceeds with Maud. She stayed for a time with an aunt who discouraged her art making.
In 1937, Maud met Everett Lewis, a cantankerous fisherman, when she answered an ad for a housekeeper that he’d posted at the local store. Lewis was reluctant. Maud was slight and disabled, and didn’t look to him like she’d be a competent maid. But she was either very charming or very persuasive — likely both — and he gave her an opportunity. The two were soon living together in Lewis’s one-room shack in Marshalltown, which measured about nine by 10 feet. Some weeks later, they were a couple. The two were married in a simple ceremony in 1938.
Maud had always been artistic, thought she had never taken a painting lesson. But as soon as she moved in with Everett, Maud began painting. At first, she wasn’t making pieces of art per se; rather, between chores, she sought to bring the former bachelor’s dusty little domicile to life by painting bright flowers and birds on its chairs and walls and window panes. Eventually she moved on, with baking sheets, pieces of pulp board and cardboard becoming her canvases. The tiny house looked like it had exploded in full bloom.
“Maud’s world was never any bigger than 60 miles in any direction,” according to a short biographical film about Lewis made by Canada’s National Film Board. She passed her days taking care of the house, and accompanied Everett on his daily fish peddling rounds, taking in the landscape from the front seat of his Model T Ford. All through the unforgiving Canadian winters, she would paint from memory. The scenes she depicted were serene and sweet, and as she didn’t mix her oil paints, they had a striking richness to them. She never painted shadows, which may be one reason many see something innocent in her work, a childlike quality that imparts a feeling of tenderness and nostalgia, and betrays the artist’s abiding happiness, even in the face of relative impoverishment.
Everett supported Maud’s painting, though it is thought perhaps begrudgingly at first. He was especially keen to enable her creativity once he realized people would pay for the art. A visiting New Yorker summering in bucolic Nova Scotia was the first to ask Maud if she could buy some painted postcards for five cents a piece. Soon Maud’s paintings were being sold in the local shop. Eventually, she set a sign reading “Paintings for Sale” along the road outside the couple’s home, and started getting real business.
By the time the Star Weekly, a national magazine, and the CBC did stories on Maud, she could scarcely keep up with demand. Even Richard Nixon’s White House ordered two of her paintings.
“Recently, they’re almost impossible to buy,” says a man in the CBC clip. “She’s selling them wet.”
Maud’s health continued to deteriorate, and as her career as an artist kept her increasingly busy, the work of housekeeping fell entirely to Everett. He was also responsible for providing wood for her to paint on. “She kept me busy cuttin’ the boards,” Everett says in A World Without Shadows, a short documentary about the artist.
Lewis’s success coincided with the broader institutionalization of the category of folk art in the academy and in museums. By the time of her death in 1970, Maud was something of a Canadian national treasure. When, after Everett’s death in 1979, the tiny house she’d so lovingly decorated began to deteriorate, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia raised money to reconstruct it and and install it in their gallery as part of a permanent exhibit of her work. In June 2017, Maudie, the first biopic to tell this unique artist’s story, will appear in theaters.
