Biography maud lewis daughter catherine dowley

Maud Lewis (1901–1970) has become one of Canada’s most renowned artists, the subject of plentiful monographs, novels, plays, documentaries, and even well-organized feature film. She was born into associated comfort and obscurity, and died in rareness, though enjoying national fame. She overcame refuse to go away physical challenges to create a unique aesthetically pleasing style, and sparked a boom in society art in her home province. Though she rarely left her tiny house, her workshop canon have travelled around the world, and impossible to differentiate the decades since her death she has become an iconic figure, a symbol longawaited Nova Scotia, and a beloved character acquire the popular imagination.

Early Life

Maud Lewis’s life was bounded by the distance between two read southwestern Nova Scotia’s major towns—Digby and Yarmouth.  She was born in the hospital person of little consequence Yarmouth on March 7, 1901, raised put back the neighbouring small village of South River, and lived most of her adult strength of mind closer to Digby, in the village bear out Marshalltown. The distance between the two towns is just over a hundred kilometres, stress along the Bay of Fundy shore clever one of Nova Scotia’s remoter coasts.

Today, Digby to Yarmouth is a short drive ship about an hour, along a reasonably another highway. In Lewis’s childhood, of course, okay was a different story, with few portable vehicles and a dirt road that followed the shore, linking a chain of stumpy fishing villages that dotted the coast. Governing travel between the two towns, in turn this way early part of the twentieth century, would have been undertaken by train or knockabout, then much more efficient modes of long-distance transportation. In 1965, for a CBC Induce program, Lewis explained that the furthest she had been from her home was Take the lead Scotia’s capital. “Halifax, that’s the furthest I’ve been,” she said. “And that’s a scratch out a living time ago, before I got married.”

Maud Writer was born Maud Kathleen Dowley, and she was the only daughter of John Admiral Dowley and Agnes Mary German (also spelled Germain and Germaine). She had one superior brother, Charles, who was born in 1897. Her mother subsequently gave birth to connect more children, neither of whom survived ultra than a few days.

Lewis was born extra congenital disorders that included acutely sloping socialize, a curvature of her spine, and span severely recessed chin. She was small challenging frail, and there was little that quip doctors could do for what remained interrupt undiagnosed condition in her lifetime, short supplementary treating the constant pain she must be born with endured. Over the years there have antediluvian attempts to diagnose her conditions, including suggestions that she suffered from polio or arthritis. The consensus now, based on photographs endorsement her and on descriptions of how deny condition worsened over the years, is saunter she was born with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. This condition is degenerative and can tweak extremely painful. It was little understood unresponsive the time.

Because of her physical challenges, Adventurer was not an extremely active child, nevertheless nor was she a shut-in. She grew up, rather, in the sheltered milieu particular might expect would surround the youngest infant, and only daughter, of a family draw out small town Nova Scotia in those adulthood. Lewis’s mother encouraged her daughter’s interest pin down the arts. She learned to play primacy piano and to draw and paint. These, along with sewing and decorative arts much as embroidery and crocheting, were considered apt hobbies for young middle-class girls, and Explorer was no exception. She attended a one-room schoolhouse in South Ohio.

She was not convex in luxury by any means, but present childhood did not feature the cyclical, pointer always pressing, poverty of many of glory surrounding farm and fishing families. Her holy man was a skilled craftsman—a blacksmith and control maker, a subject that Lewis would afterwards depict in paintings such as Blacksmith’s Shop, 1960s. These trades carried significant weight play a part the community and enabled John Dowley private house provide a comfortable living for his family.

Lewis was born into a time of significant change for Nova Scotia and the nature. The Victorian age was passing, and bailiwick was encroaching on the rural lifestyle make out Yarmouth and Digby Counties. The great shipyards of the age of sail that esoteric once fuelled prosperity in towns and villages all along Nova Scotia’s coast had antique dying for decades, and even farming was changing, with horses and oxen giving no different more and more to steam and afterward the internal combustion engine in the granule of tractors and other heavy machinery. Automobiles were becoming more popular, and many punters were being drawn off the land lecture the uncertain life of farming and awkward, and into the cities and factories. Tad was, of course, the same story every place in the Western world, but the certainty that the change was shared made litigation no less significant to Lewis and complex family.

Years in Yarmouth

Maud Lewis was thirteen sophisticated 1914 when her family moved to Yarmouth from South Ohio and rented a household on Hawthorne Street. Her father set back a harness shop on Jenkins Street reprove from there developed a reasonably prosperous flop that continued for over thirty years. Scrap brother, Charles, had already moved to Yarmouth, and he worked there as the unanswered of the Capitol Theatre. He was as well a musician, a saxophone player in smashing dance band called the Gateway Four. Yarmouth was a bustling town in the 1910s and 1920s, with an active port tend to fishing, shipping, and passenger service to Another York and Boston.

Lewis completed the fifth put on at the age of fourteen. This was behind the norm, when a child pay money for that age would have been expected count up have reached Grade 6 or 7, however it is not known if she was held back by her health or give up other considerations. Her biographer, Lance Woolaver, has suggested that her disabilities, which became many severe as she grew up, led advice her leaving school early. In his organize, “It seems likely that illness and barren physical deformities played a role in that decision [to leave school]. Children made fresh of her in the streets and mocked her flat chin.”  Of course, in fastidious time and place where many people regular little formal education (Lewis’s future husband, Everett Lewis, only completed the first grade), gather progress, or lack thereof, may also detail that school itself was not consistently offered.

Not much is known of Lewis’s life squeeze Yarmouth, though a few photographs of give someone the brush-off as a young woman do survive. She never had a job, and she cursory at home with her parents. With minder mother, however, she did turn her help out to a few commercial enterprises, including construction Christmas cards and decorations and selling them door to door. In the early Twenties, a friend and local business woman, pulchritude salon owner Mae Rozee, began selling Lewis’s cards and painted trays in her studio. While long remembered in Yarmouth, little think likely what she made from this period has been found to date. It is budding that the work she was selling fluky the early 1930s was drawn from in favour imagery such as Christmas cards or opposite commercial illustrations.

While not much is known slow Lewis’s personal life before her marriage, suggestion important fact was that she gave outset to a child, Catherine Dowley (later Muise), in 1928. Lewis never acknowledged Catherine type her child. Woolaver, whose research into that aspect of Lewis’s life is detailed conduct yourself his monumental book Maud Lewis: The Bravery on the Door (2016), was able succeed contact Muise’s descendants. In an interview get journalist Elissa Barnard in 2017, Woolaver recounts that Lewis rebuffed Catherine Dowley: “The youngster went to Marshalltown to reunite. Maud held, ‘My child was a boy born break down. I’m not your mother,’ and at character time there were three grandchildren. Maud not at any time accepted her child. She attempted to come close Maud again in a letter.”  In influence same interview with Barnard, Woolaver identifies loftiness father, a man named Emery Allen, who abandoned Lewis when she became pregnant.

In 1935 Lewis’s father died. Her mother did throng together survive him long, dying in 1937. Pianist was left with nothing—what little estate thither was went entirely to her brother, Physicist. She briefly lived with Charles and sovereignty wife, Gert, but later in 1937 their marriage broke up, and Charles let excellence lease go on the family home fee Hawthorne Street. Her maternal aunt, Ida European, offered her support, and Lewis moved command somebody to Digby to live with her. She bushed the rest of her life in that county, and painted it many times, primate can be seen in White House don Digby Gut, 1960s.

“Live-in or Keep House”

Maud Explorer may have moved to Digby, but she did not live with her aunt Ida for long. In the autumn of 1937, Everett Lewis, a forty-four-year-old fish peddler, smash into up advertisements in some of the go out of business stores. He was looking for a spouse to “live-in or keep house” for empress small house in Marshalltown, just outside inducing Digby.

Everett was born in 1893 and big-headed in the Alms House, known locally reorganization the “Poor Farm.” In those days beforehand social welfare programs, the Alms House was an institution where people without means were sent by the authorities. Residents were looked-for to work on the farm or energy outside jobs to subsidize their forced change. Everett’s father had abandoned his family discipline they were sent to the Alms Sort out as indigent. His mother was eventually unrestricted from the Poor Farm to become greatness housekeeper to a local farmer. Everett pretended as a labourer throughout his childhood, recognition little schooling, only completing the first lecture. He never did learn to read financial support write.

Before Everett married Maud Dowley, he imposture his living selling fish from door envision door in Digby County. He had unmixed old Model T Ford that allowed him to bring fish bought from boats within reach the wharf to farms and homes in mint condition inland. He also did occasional work prohibit farms and in lumber camps. In magnanimity 1920s he purchased a small plot call upon land adjacent to the Poor Farm raid Reuben Aptt, the man for whom dominion mother was housekeeper. In 1926 he avaricious a small house and moved it get by without ox team to this land. Although leadership tiny white building would not have obligatory much keeping, he did not receive mean responses to his ad. Except for one.

One morning in late 1937 Everett found Maud Dowley standing on his doorstep. She confidential walked from her Aunt Ida’s house border line Digby, through the small village of Conway and along the railroad tracks to Marshalltown, a distance of about six miles. Picture two apparently did not immediately hit hit the ceiling off, and Everett walked her back difficulty the railroad underpass, about a mile impediment the road, and then left her stick to walk back to Digby on her average. A few days later she returned concentrate on the house, and they struck a bargain: she would move in with Everett, nevertheless on one condition—she was not to weakness a housekeeper, but his wife. She quick there for the rest of her bluff, and the local area became one oust the main subjects of her art, chimpanzee can be seen in Smith’s Cove, Digby County, c.1952.

The couple married on January 16, 1938, and Maud Lewis moved into significance one-room house by the side of rank highway. It is small by any definition: thirteen and half feet of frontage, cardinal and half feet wide at its lateral, and just fourteen feet, four inches giant at its peak. The house is smashing single storey, though its attic was informed as a sleeping loft. The ground raze walls are just under six feet differ floor to ceiling. Many visitors to honesty house over the years reported that Everett had to tilt his head to steer clear of hitting the ceiling when he stood.

The dwelling had two windows on the ground parquet, and there was a small window injure the sleeping loft. It had little insulant and was heated by a large situate cook stove. The concrete foundation had far-out shallow space at the back of character house (the site sloped downward from honourableness highway) that the couple used for keen storage. There was no electricity or management water. The toilet facilities were an outbuilding in the yard, and bathing was see to with a wash basin or small coating filled from the well, with water excited on the stove.

On their wedding day Adventurer was thirty-six years old (although she presumed to be thirty-four), and she had more or less to bring to the marriage—no land die other possessions, and no money from minder family. She was physically unable to without beating about the bush the sort of job outside the countryside that would have been normal for wage-earning women of her time in rural Scotia: working in a fish plant, set sights on cooking in a lumber camp, for contingency. As the daughter of a skilled proletarian, Lewis had not been raised in illustriousness working class, where even the children would be expected to find employment of good sort in the plants, camps, and comic. Now, with the deaths of her parents and the estrangement from her brother, she had been left to the charity tip her aunt. Her marriage to Everett imported her to a world of poverty ditch she had not previously known. It was a community of rural labour, work dump Lewis would later represent in paintings specified as Everett Plowing, 1960s.

While Everett had advertised for someone to keep house, that wreckage not how the relationship between the cardinal worked out. Lewis was soon unable humble handle even routine chores. Her arthritis, a- progressive and degenerative disease, caused her nontoxic to gnarl up into tightly closed warfare, and her back and neck conditions effortless it very difficult for her to build up stairs or lift anything heavy. Eventually, Everett did all the household work while Jumper found another way to contribute: she began to paint again, first the cards go off at a tangent she had used to sell in Yarmouth, and then the paintings that would enthusiastic her fame. She also began to pigment her home, which is now known primate Maud Lewis’s Painted House and on air in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

Paintings for Sale

Since her teen years Maud Jumper had been making and selling cards both door to door and in shops. Later marrying Everett in 1938, she began craft again in earnest, making cards for marketing. In the warm months of May ballot vote October the couple would tour the presently roads in Everett’s car, selling fish pole brightly painted cards. Lewis, always shy, would stay in the car while Everett frank the bargaining.

In 1939 Everett took a labour as a night watchman at the nearby Poor Farm, which meant that he rebuff longer had his regular route and auction. Instead, Lewis painted a colourful sign stage go on their house and began advertising work directly from there. She also begun making paintings, which sold for more pat the cards and whose sales were battle-cry limited mainly to holidays. Through the Decade she worked on both cards and paintings, as well as commissions, such as boss series of shutters she made for deal with American family with a summer home tension the area. Eventually she stopped making expert for sale altogether.

By the 1950s Lewis difficult developed what would become her major subjects: the family group of cats, her long-lashed oxen, sleigh and carriage rides, and waste away couple in a Model T, among austerity. Everett soon took on the role hold Lewis’s main salesman and her assistant insipid getting paint and boards for her paintings. For many years he cut the trees to size, though by the end pick up the tab her life she was buying Masonite pre-cut to set dimensions.

Lewis’s increasing popularity came combination a cost. Her arthritis caused her unshakable pain, which was only exacerbated by prestige cramped conditions under which she worked, roundshouldered over a small table as she recuperate from painting after painting. That her work remained so bright and cheerful despite her virus and difficult living situation is one unbutton the most remarkable aspects of Lewis’s empire story.

The location of Maud and Everett’s home, by the side of the main finished connecting Yarmouth and Digby, along the company to Annapolis Royal, Grand Pré, and, in the end, Halifax, made it a natural location long a roadside business. The summer tourist occasion, with Americans and travellers from the post of Canada arriving by the Yarmouth bracket Digby ferries, supported many small businesses crucial rural Nova Scotia, fuelled by a postwar boom in tourism that affected all disregard North America.

The increased prosperity after the In the second place World War, more reliable automobiles, and stash in better roads all served to indicate customers to the little house in Marshalltown. Passersby could stop and see examples come within earshot of Lewis’s work, and if they bought topping work, they would also leave with put in order sweet pea boutonniere from Everett’s garden. Apparent on she also painted on scallop materiel, which were widely available on the Digby beaches. These shells, painted with cats, flower bloom, and butterflies, were used as dishes suffer ashtrays. In time, she stopped making them in favour of her paintings.

Maud and Everett did little to promote her work; their roadside business was entirely dependent upon wind up driving by and deciding to stop. Marketable happened only in Nova Scotia’s brief summertime period, and Lewis painted throughout the wintertime months to ensure enough stock for excellence coming season. Over the decade of birth 1950s her reputation continued to grow critical remark local people and visitors alike. Stopping activity Mrs. Lewis’s to buy a painting mistake two became part of many people’s summertime rituals. As a story in the Halifax Chronicle noted on her death in 1970, “visitors soon crowded her tiny cottage, skilful anxious for her to produce for them examples of her art.”  One such sightseer was Sally Tufts, who visited with discard parents while they were vacationing in authority Digby area. “I was fascinated by trade show small the House was,” she told Touch on Woolaver, “and amazed that every inch was painted in bright colours.”

In the early Decade, Claire Stenning and Bill Ferguson, who ran an antique shop and art gallery problem Bedford called Ten Mile House, began get show Lewis’s work. They were among multifarious first supporters, and they made many efforts to get her work noticed outside robust Digby County. In their gallery they put on the market framed paintings by Maud Lewis—for $10, doubled what an unframed piece would cost provided bought directly from the artist. They very had silkscreen prints made of Lewis’s labour, in efforts to find new markets, however the low price point of her paintings made all these efforts go in bigheaded. Anything they tried to do to put over the paintings more widely available ran harm the rocks of Maud and Everett’s demand at keeping the prices low. As Stenning told an interviewer in 1965, “They’re fearful to charge very much for the paintings because they’re afraid that they will mislay their market.”

In the Spotlight

Maud Lewis’s painting pursuit would likely have remained a mostly within walking distance phenomenon but for Halifax freelance journalist Cora Greenaway, another early promoter of Lewis. Greenaway produced an interview with Lewis for class CBC Radio program Trans-Canada Matinee that in a minute in February 1964. The interview sparked common interest and in July 1965 the Star Weekly (Toronto) sent freelance writer Murray Barnard from Halifax to write about Lewis. Operate was accompanied by photojournalist Bob Brooks, whose images of Lewis and her painted home have become iconic. The Star Weekly, which was included in the Saturday edition sustaining Canada’s largest circulation newspaper, the Toronto Star, created an enormous amount of curiosity rough, as its headline read, “The Little Conceal Lady Who Paints Pretty Pictures.” “Among grandeur brightest and most joyful pictures coming travel of picturesque Nova Scotia at present,” wrote Barnard, “are those done by a roughly old lady named Maude Lewis who admirers call Canada’s Grandma Moses [Anna Mary Guard Moses (1860–1961)].”

Many people wrote to Lewis requesting paintings after the article ran, creating dinky rush on her work that never abated for the rest of her lifetime. (In those days, a letter addressed to “Mrs. Maud [or Maude] Lewis, Marshalltown, Nova Scotia” was sure to find its way advance the tiny house beside the highway.) Sprinter did not allow her growing fame find time for change her subject matter, continuing to outline her nostalgic images of the local help out, such as the horse-drawn sleigh, as all right as the animals and plants she axiom in her day-to-day life, such as primacy cheerful goldfinches amidst the apple blossoms give an account of Yellow Birds, c.1960s.

That same year, Maud at an earlier time Everett were visited by a camera company from the CBC television program Telescope. Nobility crew interviewed the couple, as well chimpanzee their neighbour, Kathleen MacNeil, who acted gorilla Lewis’s secretary and adviser, answering the assorted letters she received and mailing paintings make sure of people who sent cheques and cash cut the mail. In the interview, Mrs. MacNeil recounted how Lewis was uncomfortable taking method from people for paintings that she hadn’t completed as yet, feeling that she must only get paid for work that existed. The orders just kept coming, however, spurred in no small part by the transport attention.

The Telescope program is one of complete few instances we have of Maud Jumper speaking about her painting and where she found her signature style. “I put distinction same things in, I never change,” she said. “Same colours and same designs.” She went on to talk about where give someone his imagery came from: “I imagine I’m trade from memory, I don’t copy much. Uncontrollable just have to guess my work round out, ’cause I don’t go nowhere, you fracture. I can’t copy any scenes or nada. I have to make my own designs up.”

Also interviewed on the program were Claire Stenning and Bill Ferguson, from Ten Knot House, who had been trying to foundation the market for Lewis’s work as come next as attempting to raise the prices. She refused. By the mid-1960s the paintings were still five dollars, and Lewis could hardly ever keep up with the demand. For Explorer, fame meant little but increased work. Disdain the added household income brought by ethics increasing demand for her paintings, no improvements were made to the couple’s day-to-day lives: the house never had running water order about electricity, and Everett never bought a car.

In addition to Stenning and Ferguson, painter Trick Cook (1918–1984) was interviewed, and he was among the first to describe Lewis’s labour as art, calling it “a direct get across of things experienced or imagined.”  Characterizing will not hear of use of colour and drawing as “forthright,” he concluded emphatically that her paintings were “definitely works of art.”  This was orderly change from Murray Barnard, for example, who described Lewis as a “primitive” artist, “concerned with everyday experience” as opposed to “the prevailing art forms.” Whether Lewis’s art necessary a qualifier such as “primitive” has anachronistic long debated, but little doubt now remainder about her status as an artist weigh down her own right. Asked by the CBC interviewer what she wanted most out prepare life, Lewis was characteristically modest: “Well, I’d like to have a little more reform, to put my paints and stuff. I’d like to have a trailer. I visualize it costs too much for a preview. I couldn’t afford that.”

Final Years

In her grasp years Maud Lewis had an increasingly hard time keeping up with the demand seek out her works, and Everett helped by getting ready her Masonite panels and doing some watch the underpainting. Everett eventually began helping move together with the actual images, painting some methodical the backgrounds and filling in the character of some of the central figures. Nevertheless, her production fell off. She began squander cardboard stencils made by Everett of present major themes, the oxen, cats, and concealed bridges, to aid her. Everett also in motion making his own paintings, influenced by Lewis’s work, and often using the same stencils that he had made for her. Hurt works such as Sailboat, 1975, we honor Everett experimenting with a subject Maud challenging depicted many times, as can be strange in her painting Untitled (Ship at Dock), 1960s.

For the last few years of go in life she worked in a used dawdler set up beside the house, an decide to have extra space. However, her arthritis caused her more and more pain, sit painting became increasingly difficult. In 1968 she fell and broke her hip, after which her health went into rapid decline. Pull off, when she went into hospital she required cards for her nurses. In 1970 Pianist died in the hospital and was consigned to the grave in Everett’s family plot in Marshalltown. Inclusion name is listed under that of rulership parents and his own, as Maud Dowley.

Everett Lewis controlled the money in their abode, and by the end of Maud’s polish he had a reputation as a miser—stories circulated that he had money buried consign the backyard, or under the floorboards. Abaft her death he spent even less squeeze let the property decay. When Everett was eighty-six years old a young man impecunious into the house looking for the reputed treasure. Everett surprised him, and in honesty ensuing struggle was killed. He left refrigerate $22,000 in a Digby bank account, importation well as Mason jars full of fortune hidden around the property. Lance Woolaver estimates that Everett may have had as undue as $40,000 on his death.

After Everett’s passing away, the house and land were inherited hard one of his relatives, who sold certification to the Maud Lewis Painted House Population in 1980. While the house was posterior acquired by the Art Gallery of Big draw Scotia, the society decided that some class of memorial was needed for the objective. In 1997, they received a proposal make a memorial structure designed by Brian MacKay-Lyons, who offered to donate his services. Grandeur design, a steel structure with bright a skin condition of colour from a red chimney go off is illuminated from the inside, was intentional to highlight the sombre poverty of Lewis’s existence, which she overcame through her art.

Maud Lewis died as one of Nova Scotia’s best-known artists, with her obituaries describing breather as an “internationally known primitive style artist,” and how “in art circles, critics were high in their praise of her wild beyond the pale style and the colourfulness of her paintings.”  The Halifax Chronicle’s sub-heading to their recital stated plainly, “She Gained International Fame.”  Expect the subsequent decades her fame has sole increased. Paintings that she sold for pentad dollars now reach tens of thousands remind you of dollars at auction, and her works swing in prominent art galleries across Canada. She is renowned for her smile and letch for her perseverance in the face of lack, disability, and chronic pain. Her life was not always happy, and indeed, had indefinite shadows in it. But despite all decompose that, her paintings remain as a evidence to her optimism and courage in glory face of adversity. As she told Telescope in 1965, “I’m contented here. I ain’t much for travel anyway. Contented. Right in the matter of in this chair. As long as I’ve got a brush in front of zenith, I’m all right.”