Maud Lewis painting evades Goodwill
‘I took one look at it and saw the name ‘Lewis’ but I was so busy it hardly registered’
Joe Tuer, Canadiana Consignment Director at Miller & Miller Auctions, is pictured above with Two Lobster Fishermen by Maud Lewis. The painting is offered as part of the February 9th auction of Post-War Canadian Folk Art.
Cleaning out a parent’s house after they pass is neither fun nor easy. Decisiveness is called for, yet is frequently stalled by sentiment and complicated by quantity.
When Karen Rogers’ and Sue Grice’s mother died in August, sorting through the contents of her Ottawa home fell to the sisters. Karen had been living with their mother and taking care of her. Sue flew in from Alberta to help organize things. Several loads were taken to Goodwill and more were soon to follow.
In their mother’s bedroom was a bookshelf. Beside it was a paper shredder. Beside that, sitting on the floor, was a painting, a childlike picture featuring two men in a boat motoring along a rocky coastline with buildings and seagulls in the background.
“I took one look at it and saw the name ‘Lewis’ but I was so busy it hardly registered,” recalls Sue. When I turned it over and saw the newspaper clippings on the back from 1965 I realized what it was. If I’d taken it to Goodwill we never would have known.”
What she found was a painting by Nova Scotia’s Maud Lewis, one of Canada’s most famous folk artists.
Now, that painting will instead be sold at Miller & Miller’s Feb. 9, 2025 Postwar Canadian Folk Art auction, estimated to bring between $16,000 and $23,000CA. It’s painted on a piece of beaverboard (a greenish pulpboard used for construction in the 1960s) and features two lobster fishermen, men known to Maud Lewis: Eddie Barnes and Ed Murphy. It was a scene she obviously liked and therefore frequently painted. Like many other repeated scenes in her paintings, it’s known as a “serial image”. A similar work is described by Lance Woolaver in his book The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis as “Portrait of Eddie Barnes and Ed Murphy, Lobster Fishermen, Bay View, N.S.”.
The painting is expected to fetch between $16,000 and $23,000CA in the upcoming auction.
Ironically, an almost identical painting was donated and discovered in a New Hamburg, Ontario thrift shop in 2017. Recognized as a Maud Lewis by a shop volunteer, it sold for what was then a record-breaking $45,000CA. It got a lot of press coverage and was auctioned around the same time as the release of the award-winning movie Maudie about the artist’s life, starring Oscar-nominated actors Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, which no doubt helped to publicize Maud’s life and work. The painting was later sold a second time through a Canadian auction house, commanding $84,000CA.
But the world record for a Maud Lewis painting was set May 14, 2022 at Miller & Miller’s Canadian & Decorative Arts auction when Black Truck sold for $350,000CA – 10 times its estimate. Once traded for a few grilled cheese lunches, coverage of the sale and the circumstances received widespread media attention, even beyond Canada.
Black Truck by Maud Lewis sold for a record-breaking $350,000CA at Miller & Miller’s May 2022 sale of Canadiana & Decorative Arts
Since then, Maud Lewis paintings have come to market with greater frequency and prices have somewhat moderated. While interest in Canadian folk art remains strong and growing, supply and demand is always a factor influencing prices collectors are willing to pay.
As writer, editor and the curator of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick Ray Cronin told The Miller Times in early 2024, Canadian folk artists were virtually unknown prior to 1997, the year of the first national tour of folk art. “The interest in folk art does seem to be growing again and that’s fuelled by Maud Lewis,” he said.
“The demand at auction for Canadian folk art of the postwar period has gained traction in the last five years”, observes Ethan Miller of Miller & Miller Auctions. “As the name Maud Lewis has made its way into popular culture, interest in her contemporaries has also risen”.
Maud Lewis (1903-1970) lived in abject poverty most of her life, selling her paintings at roadside and never for more than $10. Severely afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis, she lived with her husband Everett in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia in a one-room house without running water where she painted cheerful, childlike paintings of familiar landscapes and scenes, featuring flowers and animals.
Maud Lewis (1903-1970) hard at work in her one-room house.
The painting discovered in Sue and Karen’s mother’s home was likely bought in Nova Scotia, when the family lived in the Annapolis Valley, which was less than an hour from Maud’s home. The family frequently took Sunday drives and it may have been during one of those trips that the painting was bought. Sue vaguely remembers it hanging in one of the five homes they had in Nova Scotia (their father was in the military and they moved a lot). “I’m sure it was bought in Nova Scotia and I can vaguely recollect we had it on a basement wall in one of the houses we lived in there. We were just so young at the time.”
After deciding to sell the painting, the two sisters and their brother did a Google search on Maud Lewis, discovered the Miller & Miller record-breaking sale in 2022, and contacted co-owner Ethan Miller. “He was amazing and called me back the same day,” Sue recalls. “My only hope is the person who buys it will enjoy it,” she says.
And so the discovery of an important piece of Canadian folk art becomes an important piece of family folklore.
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:
Post-War Canadian Folk Art
February 9, 2025 | 9am EST
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