Maud Lewis
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Maud Lewis (1903-1970) was a folk artist born in Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Maud Lewis was born in Ohio, Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia in 1903 and she died in Marshaltown Nova Scotia in 1970. She remains one of Canada's best known and most loved folk artists.
She suffered from disabilities as a result of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and lived most of her life in poverty with her husband in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia. She began her artistic career by hand-drawing 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 oxen teams, horses, or cats. All 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. She died in 1970.
At the age of eighteen Maud married Everett Lewis. They were poor and lived in a small ten by twelve foot house. Soon after they were married 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 plank boards, cookie sheets, and eventually on more or less every available surface in their tiny home. It was Everett who encouraged Maud to paint and he bought her her first set of oils.
Most of Maud Lewis' paintings are quite small - often no larger than eight by ten inches, although she is known to have done at least three paintings 16 inches by 20 inches. Her technique consisted of first drawing an outline and then applying paint directly out of the tube. She never mixed colours.
Between 1945-1950 people began to stop at Maud's home and buy her paintings for two or three dollars. As time passed her paintings began to sell from 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. 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 ever increasing prices, and two of her paintings have sold for more than $16,000.
In the last year of her life Maud Lewis stayed in one corner of her house, painting as often as she could while traveling back and forth to the hospital.
Several examples of Maud's art can be found in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, which has reconstructed and restored her house and installed it in the gallery as part of a permanent Maud Lewis exhibit.
[edit] Further reading and other media
Maud Lewis is the subject of a book, The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis and two National Film Board documentaries, Maud Lewis - A World Without Shadows (1997) and The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis (1998).
