Biography
Maud Lewis

In her lifetime Maud Lewis (1903-1970) was already recognized as a remarkable talent, a painter with a unique and joyful vision of rural Nova Scotia -- its beauty, charm, culture, toil and travails. Since her death her art has received increasing critical and public acclaim and she is now acknowledged as an outstanding folk artist whose naive and untutored style reveals a wealth of human and natural beauty. Yet the joyful simplicity of her paintings belied a life of hardship, handicaps, pain and poverty.

Maud Dowley was a shy, sensitive girl born with multiple birth defects near Yarmouth. She lived much of her life there, later moving to Marshalltown, a tiny community near Digby where she met and married Everett Lewis. Although her married years were spent in a tiny shack without electricity, running water or indoor plumbing, and although she was afflicted with increasingly painful physical disabilities, she nevertheless transcended the material circumstances of her life with a rich outpouring of bright, evocative paintings. In the one-room house where she lived for 32 years, with cardboard or particleboard as a canvas, household and marine paints for her sardine-tin palette, she painted radiant and joyful pictures, rich in their representation of rural life in Nova Scotia.