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Maud Lewis

Maud Lewis
Born Maud Dowley
March 7, 1903
South Ohio, Nova Scotia, Canada
Died July 30, 1970(1970-07-30) (aged 67)
Digby, Nova Scotia, Canada
Nationality Canadian
Known for Painting
Style Folk art
Spouse(s) Everett Lewis

Maud Lewis (March 7, 1903 – July 30, 1970) was a Canadian folk artist from Nova Scotia. She remains one of Canada's best known folk artists.

Lewis was born Maud Dowley on March 7, 1903 in South Ohio, Nova Scotia, the daughter of John and Agnes (Germain) Dowley.

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 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. She used bright colours in her paintings and subjects were often of flowers, oxen teams, horses, birds, deer, or cats. Many of her paintings are of outdoor scenes. Her house was one-room with a sleeping loft and is now located in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.

Maud married Everett Lewis, a fish peddler from Marshalltown, 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 in Marshalltown, a few miles west of Digby. This house would operate as Maud's studio, where Everett would perform all of the housework. Maud Lewis accompanied her husband on his daily rounds peddling fish, bringing along Christmas cards that she had drawn. 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: walls, doors, breadboxes, even the stove. She completely covered the simple patterned commercial wallpaper with sinewy stems, leaves and blossoms. It was Everett who encouraged Maud to paint and he bought her her first set of oils. Lewis lived most of her life in poverty with her husband in the one-room house in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia.


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