A visit to Maud Lewis, Expo 67 and a coveted painting
‘The story is always part of the value’
Susan Loucks poses with the Maud Lewis painting she and her mother purchased directly from Maud in 1967. It is offered as lot 294 in Miller & Miller’s April 13th auction.
It was during a convention cocktail party in 1967 at the Digby Pines resort in Nova Scotia that Susan Loucks’ mother Marjorie learned of an intriguing local artist named Maud Lewis who lived in nearby Marshalltown. The next day mother and daughter hopped in the car to pay her a visit.
Parents Marjorie and Peter Hill were on an extended family road trip from their home in St. Catharines, Ontario to visit Expo 67 in Montreal, then on to Digby where Peter had a convention. As time would attest it turned out to be a rich and memorable trip.
Susan was 13 at the time and had just finished Grade 8. The visit to see Maud Lewis that day has remained firmly fixed in her memory, the story recounted to friends and family for over 50 years.
Her mother, who had an interest in art and was always on the lookout for new artists, was anxious to visit Maud as soon as she heard about her. “My mother asked if I wanted to tag along and I’m really glad I did,” says Susan. “Maud invited us in and I looked around, so surprised at how small the house was and how colourful it was inside. She was sitting at a little TV table with her paints in front of her with the biggest smile on her face.”
A painting Susan’s mother bought 57 years ago for the going rate of $5 is now estimated to sell at auction for between $20,000 to $23,000CA at Miller & Miller’s April 13th sale of Canadiana, Advertising & Historic Objects. The work is titled Covered Bridge in Winter. Now retired and with both her parents deceased, the painting has been a direct link to a deep and abiding family memory.
“I remember at the time being mostly taken with Maud and her personality and appearance. I thought she was amazing. Here she was still painting despite all these challenges – and with this big smile.”
Covered Bridge in Winter by Maud Lewis is offered as lot 294 in Miller & Miller’s April 13th auction of Advertising, Canadiana & Historic Objects.
Maud Lewis, who died in 1970, is a now-famous Nova Scotia folk artist who lived in abject poverty most of her life, afflicted with crippling rheumatoid arthritis. She sold her paintings at roadside and never for more than $10. Interest in her work has since skyrocketed and a world record was set at Miller & Miller’s May 14th, 2022 Canadiana & Decorative Arts auction when the hammer came down at CA$350,000 for a rare Maud Lewis painting, Black Truck. Remarkably, the painting had been traded by its owner in the 1970s for a few grilled cheese lunches.
Black Truck by Maud Lewis sold for $413,000 (including buyer’s premium) at Miller & Miller’s May 2022 sale.
The winter scene Susan Loucks has consigned to Miller & Miller features two horses pulling a sleigh about to enter a covered bridge, with another sleigh in the background. The image, which Maud repeated during the 1960s (hence her label as a serial image artist), appeared on a commemorative Canadian postage stamp in 2020 marking the 50th anniversary of her death.
“I think of all the images Maud Lewis produced in the 1960s the Covered Bridge in Winter series is one of the most successful Maud Lewis serial images,” says Alan Deacon, a Nova Scotia resident who has earned a reputation as Canada’s foremost expert on the artist. “It’s also one of the very few Maud Lewis paintings that is possible to date fairly accurately.”
Maud Lewis’s Covered Bridge serial image appeared on a commemorative Canadian postage stamp in 2020 marking the 50th anniversary of her death.
The late Harold Pearse, a visual artist and respected educator, believed the paintings of Maud Lewis were technically icons since the subject matter is limited and repeated with predictable technique. In the summer of 1997 in ARTSaltantic magazine he wrote, “The ‘Sleigh Ride’ paintings are truly icons. The elements are present in each version. They are not identical, there are slight changes in each, but there is a dogged consistency. The main components have to be there or the meaning shifts. Of what is it iconic? What does it mean? Is it simply a bright winter scene evocative of a bygone era? Is there some significance to approaching, entering, then emerging from a covered bridge or tunnel, into the darkness and out into the light? Are the dashing horse and sleigh the sign of a cry for freedom?”
Maud Lewis was well aware of Expo 67 at the time Susan and her mother bought the painting, in fact she mentions it in a January 1967 letter to her London, Ontario-based artist friend John Kinnear. She wrote that she hadn’t the time to paint anything for Expo, but also mentions someone who was making prints of her work. “I guess I won’t get anything out of it,” she laments. That letter was sold at a Miller & Miller’s Folk Art auction Oct. 14, 2023.
This 1967 letter from Maud Lewis to John Kinnear sold for $4,520 (including buyer’s premium) at Miller & Miller’s October 13, 2023 sale.
So often the stories that accompany Maud Lewis paintings are as revered as the paintings themselves. As Hamilton Spectator journalist Jeff Mahoney wrote of Maud Lewis in 2021 during an exhibition of her work at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, “Art, the theory goes, should stand or fall on its own strengths. Still though, the story is often inseparable from creative evaluation, and never so clearly as here.”
Where Maud Lewis is concerned, “it’s more than art, it’s a symbol of something bigger,” echoes Miller & Miller co-owner Ethan Miller. “The story is part of the value.”
As for selling the painting after being so long in the family, Susan admits, “it did take quite a while to come around to selling it. There’s obviously a very emotional attachment. That’s because my mother and I did this. She was a smart lady. She had an eye.
“It’ll soon be sitting in someone else’s home and hopefully with someone who absolutely loves it and understands the beauty of it and the joy Maud had in painting it. It deserves a good home. It deserves to be loved.”
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.
Auction Details:
Advertising, Canadiana & Historic Objects
April 13, 2024
9am EST