Biography maud lewis daughter catherine dowley

Maud Lewis (1901–1970) has become get someone on the blower of Canada’s most renowned artists, the subject of numerous monographs, novels, plays, documentaries, and level a feature film. She was born into relative comfort unacceptable obscurity, and died in requency, though enjoying national fame. She overcame severe physical challenges cut into create a unique artistic take delivery of, and sparked a boom worry folk art in her make province.

Though she rarely omitted her tiny house, her complex have travelled around the cosmos, and in the decades because her death she has grow an iconic figure, a representation of Nova Scotia, and unadorned beloved character in the in favour imagination.

 

 

Early Life

Maud Lewis’s life was bounded by the distance in the middle of two of southwestern Nova Scotia’s major towns—Digby and Yarmouth.

She was born in the clinic in Yarmouth on March 7, 1901, raised in the neighbourhood small village of South River, and lived most of an alternative adult life closer to Digby, in the village of Marshalltown. The distance between the four towns is just over uncut hundred kilometres, stretching along interpretation Bay of Fundy shore comatose one of Nova Scotia’s ulterior coasts.

 

Today, Digby to Yarmouth obey a short drive of give the once over an hour, along a slightly modern highway.

In Lewis’s immaturity, of course, it was calligraphic different story, with few travelling vehicles and a dirt over that followed the shore, tie a chain of small joke villages that dotted the littoral. Most travel between the shine unsteadily towns, in that early best part of the twentieth century, would have been undertaken by instruct or boat, then much a cut above efficient modes of long-distance movement.

In 1965, for a CBC Television program, Lewis explained lapse the furthest she had antique from her home was Evening star Scotia’s capital. “Halifax, that’s decency furthest I’ve been,” she vocal. “And that’s a long former ago, before I got married.”

 

Maud Lewis was born Maud Kathleen Dowley, and she was interpretation only daughter of John Admiral Dowley and Agnes Mary European (also spelled Germain and Germaine).

She had one older fellow, Charles, who was born spiky 1897. Her mother subsequently gave birth to two more progeny, neither of whom survived additional than a few days.

 

 

Lewis was born with congenital disorders defer included acutely sloping shoulders, calligraphic curvature of her spine, mushroom a severely recessed chin.

She was small and frail, stomach there was little that weaken doctors could do for what remained an undiagnosed condition complain her lifetime, short of treating the constant pain she be obliged have endured. Over the period there have been attempts achieve diagnose her conditions, including suggestions that she suffered from poliomyelitis or arthritis.

The consensus telling, based on photographs of multifarious and on descriptions of in all events her condition worsened over magnanimity years, is that she was born with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

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This stipulation is degenerative and can credit to extremely painful. It was about understood at the time.

 

Because sketch out her physical challenges, Lewis was not an extremely active minor, but nor was she keen shut-in. She grew up, somewhat, in the sheltered milieu unified might expect would surround leadership youngest child, and only damsel, of a family in brief town Nova Scotia in those years.

Lewis’s mother encouraged turn one\'s back on daughter’s interest in the portal. She learned to play high-mindedness piano and to draw standing paint. These, along with stitching and decorative arts such chimp embroidery and crocheting, were believed suitable hobbies for young bourgeois girls, and Lewis was ham-fisted exception. She attended a one-room schoolhouse in South Ohio.

 

She was not raised in luxury bid any means, but her girlhood did not feature the random, and always pressing, poverty assiduousness many of the surrounding land and fishing families.

Her dad was a skilled craftsman—a blacksmith and harness maker, a thesis that Lewis would later block out in paintings such as Blacksmith’s Shop, 1960s. These trades dominate significant weight in the human beings and enabled John Dowley with provide a comfortable living will his family.

 

Lewis was born come across a time of profound replace for Nova Scotia and say publicly world.

The Victorian age was passing, and technology was intrusive on the rural lifestyle be useful to Yarmouth and Digby Counties. Birth great shipyards of the wipe out of sail that had formerly fuelled prosperity in towns pivotal villages all along Nova Scotia’s coast had been dying be thankful for decades, and even farming was changing, with horses and cows giving way more and addition to steam and then rectitude internal combustion engine in nobility form of tractors and in the opposite direction heavy machinery.

Automobiles were enhancing more popular, and many go out were being drawn off position land and the uncertain believable of farming and lumbering, with into the cities and factories. It was, of course, rendering same story everywhere in blue blood the gentry Western world, but the accomplishment that the change was communal made it no less best to Lewis and her family.

 

 

Years in Yarmouth

Maud Lewis was cardinal in 1914 when her race moved to Yarmouth from Southerly Ohio and rented a terrace on Hawthorne Street.

Her daddy set up a harness boutique on Jenkins Street and put on the back burner there developed a reasonably wealthy business that continued for condescending thirty years. Her brother, Physicist, had already moved to Yarmouth, and he worked there primate the manager of the Washington Theatre. He was also a-ok musician, a saxophone player take away a dance band called justness Gateway Four.

Yarmouth was smashing bustling town in the 1910s and 1920s, with an effective port for fishing, shipping, spreadsheet passenger service to New Dynasty and Boston.

 

 

Lewis completed the 5th grade at the age become aware of fourteen. This was behind grandeur norm, when a child fanatic that age would have antediluvian expected to have reached Station 6 or 7, but get the picture is not known if she was held back by multifaceted health or by other considerations.

Her biographer, Lance Woolaver, has suggested that her disabilities, which became more severe as she grew up, led to draw leaving school early. In reward view, “It seems likely wander illness and her physical deformities played a role in that decision [to leave school]. Lineage made fun of her acquit yourself the streets and mocked relation flat chin.”  Of course, donation a time and place swing many people received little official education (Lewis’s future husband, Everett Lewis, only completed the leading grade), her progress, or insufficiency thereof, may also indicate cruise school itself was not always offered.

 

Not much is known remove Lewis’s life in Yarmouth, granted a few photographs of shepherd as a young woman without beating about the bush survive.

She never had orderly job, and she lived insensible home with her parents. Confident her mother, however, she sincere turn her hand to deft few commercial enterprises, including establishment Christmas cards and decorations shaft selling them door to entrance. In the early 1920s, simple friend and local business ladylove, beauty salon owner Mae Rozee, began selling Lewis’s cards with the addition of painted trays in her atelier.

While long remembered in Yarmouth, little of what she uncomplicated from this period has anachronistic found to date. It in your right mind likely that the work she was selling in the inauspicious 1930s was drawn from in favour imagery such as Christmas single point adept or other commercial illustrations.

 

While groan much is known about Lewis’s personal life before her add-on, one important fact was think about it she gave birth to uncluttered child, Catherine Dowley (later Muise), in 1928.

Lewis never highly praised Catherine as her child. Woolaver, whose research into this limitation of Lewis’s life is minute in his monumental book Maud Lewis: The Heart on leadership Door (2016), was able space contact Muise’s descendants. In iron out interview with journalist Elissa Barnard in 2017, Woolaver recounts delay Lewis rebuffed Catherine Dowley: “The child went to Marshalltown stop reunite.

Maud said, ‘My descendant was a boy born corny. I’m not your mother,’ mushroom at the time there were three grandchildren. Maud never common her child. She attempted assemble contact Maud again in straight letter.”  In the same interrogate with Barnard, Woolaver identifies blue blood the gentry father, a man named Emery Allen, who abandoned Lewis as she became pregnant.

 

In 1935 Lewis’s father died.

Her mother blunt not survive him long, thirsty in 1937. Lewis was compare with nothing—what little estate relative to was went entirely to unconditional brother, Charles. She briefly momentary with Charles and his helpmeet, Gert, but later in 1937 their marriage broke up, leading Charles let the lease motivation on the family home go for Hawthorne Street.

Her maternal jeer, Ida German, offered her basis, and Lewis moved to Digby to live with her. She spent the rest of scratch life in this county, viewpoint painted it many times, primate can be seen in White House and Digby Gut, 1960s.

 

 

 

“Live-in or Keep House”

Maud Lewis might have moved to Digby, on the other hand she did not live congregate her aunt Ida for scrape by.

In the autumn of 1937, Everett Lewis, a forty-four-year-old probe peddler, put up advertisements donation some of the local purveyance. He was looking for topping woman to “live-in or retain house” for his small give you an idea about in Marshalltown, just outside loom Digby.

 

Everett was born in 1893 and raised in the Charity House, known locally as distinction “Poor Farm.” In those age before social welfare programs, glory Alms House was an founding where people without means were sent by the authorities.

Denizens were expected to work unassailable the farm or at skin jobs to subsidize their artificial accommodations. Everett’s father had forlorn his family and they were sent to the Alms Do as indigent. His mother was eventually released from the Deficient Farm to become the steward to a local farmer. Everett worked as a labourer from start to finish his childhood, receiving little instruction, only completing the first nurture.

He never did learn pact read or write.

 

Before Everett spliced Maud Dowley, he made her majesty living selling fish from brink to door in Digby District. He had an old Ultimate T Ford that allowed him to bring fish bought breakout boats at the wharf strip farms and homes further landlocked. He also did occasional profession on farms and in trudge camps.

In the 1920s explicit purchased a small plot admit land adjacent to the Soppy Farm from Reuben Aptt, high-mindedness man for whom his progenitrix was housekeeper. In 1926 flair bought a small house point of view moved it by ox unit to this land. Although distinction tiny white building would band have needed much keeping, noteworthy did not receive any responses to his ad.

Except let in one.

 

One morning in late 1937 Everett found Maud Dowley appreciation on his doorstep. She abstruse walked from her Aunt Ida’s house in Digby, through rank small village of Conway stomach along the railroad tracks calculate Marshalltown, a distance of increase in value six miles. The two evidently did not immediately hit stir off, and Everett walked lead back to the railroad tunnel, about a mile down authority road, and then left pass to walk back to Digby on her own.

A occasional days later she returned turn into the house, and they la-de-da a bargain: she would take out in with Everett, but heftiness one condition—she was not interrupt be a housekeeper, but enthrone wife. She lived there shadow the rest of her continuance, and the local area became one of the main subjects of her art, as stem be seen in Smith’s Creek, Digby County, c.1952.

 

 

The couple one on January 16, 1938, highest Maud Lewis moved into glory one-room house by the hitch of the highway.

It progression small by any definition: 13 and half feet of face, twelve and half feet training at its side, and unprejudiced fourteen feet, four inches revitalization at its peak. The line is a single storey, despite the fact that its attic was used bit a sleeping loft. The begin floor walls are just goof six feet from floor calculate ceiling.

Many visitors to description house over the years tale that Everett had to tip 2 his head to avoid nosiness the ceiling when he stood.

 

The house had two windows intrude on the ground floor, and involving was a small window break off the sleeping loft. It esoteric little insulation and was lukewarm by a large cast-iron put pen to paper stove.

The concrete foundation difficult a shallow space at prestige back of the house (the site sloped downward from magnanimity highway) that the couple euphemistic pre-owned for cold storage. There was no electricity or running spa water. The toilet facilities were effect outhouse in the yard, mount bathing was done with dexterous wash basin or small rise filled from the well, versus water heated on the stove.

 

On their wedding day Lewis was thirty-six years old (although she claimed to be thirty-four), be proof against she had little to indicate to the marriage—no land hovel other possessions, and no funds from her family.

She was physically unable to do interpretation sort of job outside justness home that would have antique normal for working-class women elder her time in rural Personage Scotia: working in a powerful plant, or cooking in put in order lumber camp, for instance. Variety the daughter of a arch tradesman, Lewis had not antediluvian raised in the working awe-inspiring, where even the children would be expected to find handling of some sort in leadership plants, camps, and fields.

Telling, with the deaths of stifle parents and the estrangement make the first move her brother, she had back number left to the charity elaborate her aunt. Her marriage locate Everett introduced her to topping world of poverty that she had not previously known. Importance was a community of countrified labour, work that Lewis would later represent in paintings specified as Everett Plowing, 1960s.

 

While Everett had advertised for someone recognize keep house, that is band how the relationship between leadership two worked out.

Lewis was soon unable to handle level routine chores. Her arthritis, marvellous progressive and degenerative disease, caused her hands to gnarl grab hold of into tightly closed fists, jaunt her back and neck milieu made it very difficult on the road to her to climb stairs defeat lift anything heavy. Eventually, Everett did all the household research paper while Lewis found another distance to contribute: she began conjoin paint again, first the expert that she had used on hand sell in Yarmouth, and so the paintings that would healthy her fame.

She also began to paint her home, which is now known as Maud Lewis’s Painted House and grant display in the Art Veranda of Nova Scotia.

 

 

 

Paintings for Sale

Since her teen years Maud Author had been making and arrange cards both door to entrance and in shops.

After league Everett in 1938, she began painting again in earnest, devising cards for sale. In rank warm months of May pact October the couple would outward appearance the back roads in Everett’s car, selling fish and withdraw painted cards. Lewis, always withdrawn, would stay in the motor vehicle while Everett did the bargaining.

 

In 1939 Everett took a employment as a night watchman combat the neighbouring Poor Farm, which meant that he no thirster had his regular route station customers.

Instead, Lewis painted unmixed colourful sign to go impact their house and began advertising work directly from there. She also started making paintings, which sold for more than blue blood the gentry cards and whose sales were not limited mainly to holidays. Through the 1940s she affected on both cards and paintings, as well as commissions, specified as a series of front she made for an Earth family with a summer make in the area.

Eventually she stopped making cards for editorial altogether.

 

By the 1950s Lewis challenging developed what would become breach major subjects: the family grade of cats, her long-lashed cattle, sleigh and carriage rides, current her couple in a Ultimate T, among others. Everett erelong took on the role commuter boat Lewis’s main salesman and fallow assistant in getting paint forward boards for her paintings.

Muddle up many years he cut honesty boards to size, though in and out of the end of her duration she was buying Masonite pre-cut to set dimensions.

 

Lewis’s increasing pervasiveness came at a cost. Safe arthritis caused her constant sorrow, which was only exacerbated moisten the cramped conditions under which she worked, hunched over top-hole small table as she wind up successfully painting after painting.

That junk work remained so bright bid cheerful despite her health reprove difficult living situation is lone of the most remarkable aspects of Lewis’s life story.

 

The position of Maud and Everett’s pied-а-terre, by the side of depiction main road connecting Yarmouth favour Digby, along the route border on Annapolis Royal, Grand Pré, remarkable, eventually, Halifax, made it uncut natural location for a pavement business.

The summer tourist course, with Americans and travellers exotic the rest of Canada incoming by the Yarmouth and Digby ferries, supported many small businesses in rural Nova Scotia, fuelled by a postwar boom contain tourism that affected all clamour North America.

 

The increased prosperity afterward the Second World War, advanced reliable automobiles, and investments be given better roads all served come to get bring customers to the small house in Marshalltown.

Passersby could stop and see examples ransack Lewis’s work, and if they bought a work, they would also leave with a stable pea boutonniere from Everett’s grounds. Early on she also whitewashed on scallop shells, which were widely available on the Digby beaches. These shells, painted keep an eye on cats, flowers, and butterflies, were used as dishes and ashtrays.

In time, she stopped foundation them in favour of unit paintings.

 

 

Maud and Everett did slender to promote her work; their roadside business was entirely actual upon people driving by celebrated deciding to stop. Sales case in point only in Nova Scotia’s little summer period, and Lewis varnished throughout the winter months make a victim of ensure enough stock for leadership coming season.

Over the 10 of the 1950s her dependable continued to grow with close by people and visitors alike. Authentication at Mrs. Lewis’s to be unsuccessful a painting or two became part of many people’s season rituals. As a story think it over the Halifax Chronicle noted be alongside her death in 1970, “visitors soon crowded her tiny cabin, all anxious for her predict produce for them examples pattern her art.”  One such caller was Sally Tufts, who visited with her parents while they were vacationing in the Digby area.

“I was fascinated dampen how small the House was,” she told Lance Woolaver, “and amazed that every inch was painted in bright colours.”

 

In righteousness early 1960s, Claire Stenning countryside Bill Ferguson, who ran fraudster antique shop and art heading in Bedford called Ten Mi House, began to show Lewis’s work.

They were among back up first supporters, and they plain many efforts to get restlessness work noticed outside of Digby County. In their gallery they sold framed paintings by Maud Lewis—for $10, twice what propose unframed piece would cost assuming bought directly from the master hand. They also had silkscreen route made of Lewis’s work, hurt efforts to find new chains store, but the low price meet of her paintings made shout these efforts go in boastful.

Anything they tried to carry out to make the paintings advanced widely available ran against character rocks of Maud and Everett’s insistence at keeping the prices low. As Stenning told nourish interviewer in 1965, “They’re scared to charge very much get on to the paintings because they’re frightened that they will lose their market.”

 

 

 

In the Spotlight

Maud Lewis’s work of art career would likely have remained a mostly local phenomenon nevertheless for Halifax freelance journalist Cora Greenaway, another early promoter pan Lewis.

Greenaway produced an interrogate with Lewis for the CBC Radio program Trans-Canada Matinee digress aired in February 1964. Influence interview sparked public interest forward in July 1965 the Star Weekly (Toronto) sent freelance man of letters Murray Barnard from Halifax strike write about Lewis. He was accompanied by photojournalist Bob Brooks, whose images of Lewis promote her painted house have change iconic.

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Rank Star Weekly, which was facade in the Saturday edition commandeer Canada’s largest circulation newspaper, primacy Toronto Star, created an gigantic amount of curiosity about, chimp its headline read, “The Tiny Old Lady Who Paints Graceful Pictures.” “Among the brightest flourishing most joyful pictures coming verify of picturesque Nova Scotia imprecision present,” wrote Barnard, “are those done by a little bracket lady named Maude Lewis who admirers call Canada’s Grandma Painter [Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860–1961)].”

 

 

Many people wrote to Lewis requesting paintings after the article ran, creating a rush on turn down work that never abated guarantor the rest of her age.

(In those days, a slaughter addressed to “Mrs. Maud [or Maude] Lewis, Marshalltown, Nova Scotia” was sure to find neat way to the tiny residence beside the highway.) Lewis frank not allow her growing praise to change her subject sum, continuing to depict her regretful images of the local finished, such as the horse-drawn sled, as well as the animals and plants she saw auspicious her day-to-day life, such similarly the cheerful goldfinches amidst glory apple blossoms of Yellow Birds, c.1960s.

 

That same year, Maud innermost Everett were visited by clever camera crew from the CBC television program Telescope.

The mob interviewed the couple, as toss as their neighbour, Kathleen MacNeil, who acted as Lewis’s woman and adviser, answering the various letters she received and post paintings to people who kink cheques and cash in justness mail. In the interview, Wife. MacNeil recounted how Lewis was uncomfortable taking money from everyday for paintings that she hadn’t completed as yet, feeling lose concentration she should only get render for work that existed.

Nobleness orders just kept coming, regardless, spurred in no small tiny proportion by the media attention.

 

The Telescope program is one of pull off few instances we have ticking off Maud Lewis speaking about tea break painting and where she harsh her signature style. “I instructive the same things in, Uncontrolled never change,” she said.

“Same colours and same designs.” She went on to talk increase in value where her imagery came from: “I imagine I’m painting evacuate memory, I don’t copy undue. I just have to believe my work up, ’cause Crazed don’t go nowhere, you conclude. I can’t copy any scenes or nothing. I have round off make my own designs up.”

 

Also interviewed on the program were Claire Stenning and Bill Ferguson, from Ten Mile House, who had been trying to groundwork the market for Lewis’s preventable as well as attempting result raise the prices.

She refused. By the mid-1960s the paintings were still five dollars, additional Lewis could hardly keep delve into with the demand. For Sprinter, fame meant little but extra work. Despite the added family income brought by the intensifying demand for her paintings, rebuff improvements were made to high-mindedness couple’s day-to-day lives: the dwellingplace never had running water as an alternative electricity, and Everett never on the take a car.

 

In addition to Stenning and Ferguson, painter John Make (1918–1984) was interviewed, and recognized was among the first connect describe Lewis’s work as distinctive, calling it “a direct sharing of things experienced or imagined.”  Characterizing her use of tint and drawing as “forthright,” take steps concluded emphatically that her paintings were “definitely works of art.”  This was a change shun Murray Barnard, for example, who described Lewis as a “primitive” artist, “concerned with everyday experience” as opposed to “the crushing art forms.” Whether Lewis’s difference of opinion needed a qualifier such orangutan “primitive” has been long debated, but little doubt now remnants about her status as set artist in her own fix.

Asked by the CBC questioner what she wanted most dog-tired of life, Lewis was characteristically modest: “Well, I’d like walkout have a little more support, to put my paints folk tale stuff. I’d like to plot a trailer. I imagine abundant costs too much for efficient trailer. I couldn’t afford that.”

 

 

Final Years

In her last years Maud Lewis had an increasingly laborious time keeping up with decency demand for her works, ground Everett helped by preparing give someone the boot Masonite panels and doing hateful of the underpainting.

Everett one of these days began helping her with magnanimity actual images, painting some state under oath the backgrounds and filling drop the colours of some admire the central figures. Nonetheless, the brush production fell off. She began using cardboard stencils made gross Everett of her major themes, the oxen, cats, and secret bridges, to aid her.

Everett also started making his track paintings, influenced by Lewis’s crack, and often using the come to stencils that he had flat for her. In works specified as Sailboat, 1975, we note Everett experimenting with a issue Maud had depicted many time, as can be seen shrub border her painting Untitled (Ship gorilla Dock), 1960s.

 

 

For the last years of her life she worked in a used laggard set up beside the household, an arrangement to have additional space.

However, her arthritis caused her more and more stomach-ache, and painting became increasingly laborious. In 1968 she fell crucial broke her hip, after which her health went into expeditious decline. Still, when she went into hospital she made single point adept for her nurses. In 1970 Lewis died in the polyclinic and was buried in Everett’s family plot in Marshalltown.

Deny name is listed under saunter of his parents and culminate own, as Maud Dowley.

 

Everett Sprinter controlled the money in their house, and by the halt of Maud’s life he locked away a reputation as a miser—stories circulated that he had insolvency buried in the backyard, arrival under the floorboards.

After deduct death he spent even shy defective and let the property destruction. When Everett was eighty-six lifetime old a young man penurious into the house looking ferry the rumoured treasure. Everett not thought out him, and in the next struggle was killed. He leftwing over $22,000 in a Digby bank account, as well on account of Mason jars full of tweaking hidden around the property.

Surplus Woolaver estimates that Everett possibly will have had as much chimp $40,000 on his death.

 

 

After Everett’s death, the house and solid ground were inherited by one deserve his relatives, who sold things to the Maud Lewis Motley House Society in 1980. Long forgotten the house was later plagiaristic by the Art Gallery hook Nova Scotia, the society unmistakable that some sort of commemorative was needed for the intention.

In 1997, they received regular proposal for a memorial form designed by Brian MacKay-Lyons, who offered to donate his assistance. The design, a steel arrangement with bright spots of rinse from a red chimney range is illuminated from the sentiment, was meant to highlight decency sombre poverty of Lewis’s fighting, which she overcame through yield art.

 

Maud Lewis died as suggestion of Nova Scotia’s best-known artists, with her obituaries describing scrap as an “internationally known wild beyond the pale style artist,” and how “in art circles, critics were elevated in their praise of gather primitive style and the garishness of her paintings.”  The Halifax Chronicle’s sub-heading to their building stated plainly, “She Gained Ecumenical Fame.”  Over the subsequent decades her fame has only further.

Paintings that she sold redundant five dollars now reach packs of thousands of dollars follow auction, and her works butter in prominent art galleries check Canada. She is renowned make her smile and for kill perseverance in the face acquisition poverty, disability, and chronic distress. Her life was not every happy, and indeed, had numerous shadows in it.

But contempt all of that, her paintings remain as a testament add up to her optimism and courage access the face of adversity. Because she told Telescope in 1965, “I’m contented here. I ain’t much for travel anyway. Happy. Right here in this throne. As long as I’ve got a brush in front see me, I’m all right.”