Maud Lewis

Canadian·1903-1970

Maud Lewis painted the world she could see from a tiny one-room house in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, filling boards, walls, doors, and even the woodstove with bold, flattened images of oxen, cats, birds, and snow-covered landscapes. Born Maud Dowley in 1903 in South Ohio, Nova Scotia, she began making and selling small painted Christmas cards as a young woman, working around rheumatoid arthritis that increasingly curtailed her movement throughout her life. After her parents died in the 1930s, she settled in Digby with an aunt, then in 1938 married fish peddler Everett Lewis and moved into the modest home that became both her subject and her canvas. Working with simple house paints in a bright, direct, self-taught style, she sold her small paintings for a few dollars from her doorstep and by mail order. Media attention in the 1960s brought her wide public recognition across Canada, even as she remained largely outside formal art institutions. She died in 1970, and her house and paintings are now held as important examples of Canadian folk art.