Maud Lewis lived in crushing poverty for most of her life but some of her paintings are being sold for a small fortune.
One of the late Nova Scotia folk artist’s early works, titled Springtime in the Maritimes, sold for $108,900 at an auction in Ontario on Thursday, dwarfing the single dollar
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or less
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she often sold similar paintings for when she lived in Marshalltown, Digby County. The auction price includes the buyer’s premium
“It’s a marvelous painting,” Alan Deacon, a Lewis authenticity expert with Art Experts Canada Inc., said in a news release. “It’s one of the best early works I’ve seen. We don’t get many of Maud’s early works coming to auction.”
Lewis lived with her husband Everett in a single-room house with no running water and often had to recycle her meagre paint supplies just to continue to create art.
Although she gained a measure of notoriety in the 1960s, she never got more than $10 for any of her paintings. Most times she would accept a dollar or two and then use the money for food or heat.
This particular painting was a gift more than 80 years ago from the artist to Marian Porter, who became the first Flying Officer from Canada to perform a parachute rescue in 1951 with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Her only child, Janie Porter, inherited it when she died in 2023 and it went up for bidding at Miller and Miller Auctions Ltd., in New Hamburg, Ont.
The same auction house sold Lewis’s Black Truck painting in 2022 for $350,000, the highest price ever paid for one of her pieces. The $108,900 paid for Springtime in the Maritimes is the second-highest price ever. It is an oil painting on Masonite, measuring 31.75 by 33 centimetres.
Deacon has been studying Lewis’s art for 58 years and pointed out how Springtime in the Maritimes has the rarest of her three signatures
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M. Lewis.
“It’s so different than what she produced 30 years later,” Deacon said in the release. “I love her early work because it’s so detailed.”
Lewis suffered from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and lived with chronic joint pain and hand deformity, which made it a challenge to hold her brushes. She taught herself to paint and was posthumously the subject of a 2016 autobiographical film titled Maudie, starring Sally Hawkins as her and Ethan Hawke as Everett.
Lewis died in 1970 at the age of 67. Many of her works are displayed at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. Three of her paintings have been featured on stamps issued by Canada Post.