Maud Lewis letter reflects rare friendship, correspondence
“It is never too late to help someone. You may be the only one that does:” Kinnear
Sheila M. Kinnear poses with a handwritten letter from Maud Lewis to her father, John H. Kinnear. The letter is offered as part of Miller & Miller’s October 14th sale of Folk Art.
In 1965, The Star Weekly magazine and CBC-TV both shone a spotlight on the little-known, self-taught Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis and things suddenly changed.
Details of her secluded and impoverished life in Marshalltown, where she and her husband Everett shared a tiny one-room house with no electricity or running water, became public knowledge. She complained about receiving more than 300 letters after all the publicity and evidently had no plans to answer them. When the White House wrote to secure two paintings her response was concise: she would send the paintings after receiving payment. Her work was suddenly in great demand, but she was impervious to the fame.
While it’s believed Maud Lewis had few correspondents during that time, there is one man she wrote to and who wrote her back, while also sending packages of badly-needed art supplies: John H. Kinnear, of London, Ontario.
In his book The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis, Lance Woolaver writes, “Maud was not a careerist, and she valued those friends, like Ontario painter John Kinnear who corresponded with her regularly, far more than an order from a Premier or President”. (p66)
An artist himself, Kinnear had read The Star Weekly story and was captured by Lewis’s plight. He was deeply moved by her circumstances, her poverty and severe disabilities. But he also recognized her extraordinary talent and took it upon himself to do what he could to help.
And so began their friendship and rare correspondence, which lasted five years until Lewis died of pneumonia in 1970.
Pictured above: Sheila M. Kinnear with her father, John H. Kinnear.
An advertisement for John H. Kinnear’s art gallery located on Dundas Street in London, Ontario.
Kinnear’s daughter Sheila M. Kinnear, also an artist, remembers that relationship and inherited many of the letters sent to her father by Maud Lewis. One of them, from Jan. 30, 1967, will be sold at Miller & Miller’s Folk Art auction on October 14, 2023. (Lot 200, estimate CA$2,000 to CA$3,000.) In it, Lewis says she’s sending him a painting (presumably as a gift) called The Country Dance, but wants no money for it. (That painting has never surfaced.) Lewis also addresses Kinnear’s earlier question of whether she’ll participate in Canada’s centennial exhibition: “No, I’m not putting anything in Expo ’67. I haven’t the time to paint anything for it.” She also notes someone was making prints of her paintings. “I guess I won’t get anything out of it. They will get all the money for them,” she writes.
In a story by Sheila Kinnear, which appeared in Reader’s Digest in 2021, she describes her father’s affinity for Maud Lewis. She explains he was a Second World War veteran who’d fought the Nazis and been a prisoner of war three times. “He knew pain and hardship,” she writes. He also valued kindness and believed in giving others a hand. She remembers her father saying, “After all, it is never too late to help someone. You may be the only one that does.”
Sheila Kinnear grew up around art and artists and learned many things from her Dad. “When I was 12 years old, my father taught me the process of properly sanding Masonite boards and crosshatch-priming them with gesso. I used these lessons to prime Lewis’s boards,” she writes.
“My father kept a list of paint colours Lewis requested – she would ask for tubes of acrylic paint in bright red, daffodil yellow, black, sap green, white, brown and various shades of blue…”. Sheila says it was important to her father to see Maud Lewis using proper materials that would stand the test of time, unlike the greenboard and beaverboard she was first using which would warp, or the house paints she used which would eventually disintegrate and peel off.
In gratitude for all these supplies, Maud Lewis would write to her father and send him two or three, sometimes five paintings. Some were gifts and others he would try and sell on her behalf for $24. One of them, featuring a man with lobster traps, will be sold at Miller & Miller’s Folk Art auction on October 14, 2023. (Lot 201, estimate CA$30,000 to CA$40,000.) Sheila estimates her father sold about 40 of Lewis’s paintings in the London and surrounding area before she died of pneumonia in 1970.
The Lobsterman by Maud Lewis is offered as lot 201 in the October 14th Folk Art sale at Miller & Miller Auctions.
John Kinnear kept most of the letters Maud wrote to him in a trunk, while some found their way into others’ hands as gifts, or accompaniments to her paintings.
“A few months before his death in 2003, my father and I opened the trunk together,” wrote Sheila in her Reader’s Digest story. “I remember his smile as we recalled the days gone by, and the little old lady who painted pretty pictures.”
As interest in Maud Lewis continues to spread and her work increases in value, that early relationship she formed with fellow artist John Kinnear and the contributions his daughter Sheila made, undoubtedly continue to play a role.
“I am sure my father would have been thrilled to learn that Lewis’s paintings have reached new heights and awareness in the global art market,” says Sheila.
By Diane Sewell
Diane Sewell has been a writer for more than 25 years, producing feature stories for some of the country’s top newspapers and consumer magazines, as well as client newsletters and commissioned books.
SALE DETAILS:
Folk Art
October 14, 2023
9am EST
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