Rare 1940s Maud Lewis sells for CA$108,900
‘It’s a marvellous painting’
The above painting by Maud Lewis sold for $108,900 (including buyer’s premium) on Feb. 12, 2026 at Miller & Miller’s sale of Post-War Folk Art.
One of the best early works by the late, great Nova Scotia folk artist, Maud Lewis, featuring a detailed bucolic Maritime farmscape, sold for CA$108,900 (including buyer’s premium) at Miller & Miller’s February 12th sale of Post-War Folk Art. It represents the second-highest price ever achieved for a Maud Lewis painting at auction, with Miller & Miller Auctions also holding the world record with the sale of Black Truck in 2022 for CA$413,000 (with buyer’s premium).
The small 1940s oil painting had been in the possession of the same family for roughly 80 years and was a gift from Maud to her friend and life-long fellow Maritimer, the late Marian Frances Porter, who had a claim to fame herself. According to her daughter Janie Porter, who lives in Pennsylvania, her parents lived in Chester Basin, N.S. and shared a love of local Nova Scotia artists. They visited Maud on several occasions and during one of them, her father Frederick Porter, snapped a picture of Maud and her husband Everett outside their tiny home in Marshalltown.
Frederick Porter captured this photo of Maud and Everett outside their tiny home during a visit with Marian.
“It’s a marvellous painting,” says Alan Deacon, a Maud Lewis authenticity expert with Art Experts Canada Inc., who has been studying the artist and her work for 58 years. “It’s one of the best early works I've seen. We don’t get many of Maud’s early works coming to auction.”
The painting is one of the best early works that Maud Lewis authenticity expert Alan Deacon has seen.
The painting features an idyllic scene with a farm house and surrounding field, a barn, silo and a distant church spire. There are three small figures: one ploughing with a horse, one fishing on the banks and another fishing from a small boat. The trees have a yellow-green hue typical of spring and there are rows of tulips and reflections depicted in the water.
A similar, but later image, appears in Lance Woolaver’s widely referenced 1996 book, The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis, but it is incorrectly identified as Maud’s homestead in South Ohio, Nova Scotia, which has resulted in some confusion over the years. Deacon says Canadian census records have confirmed Maud’s family, the Dowleys, never lived in South Ohio. A correction was later made in Woolaver’s 2016 book, Maud Lewis: The Heart on the Door.
A similar image appears in Lance Woolaver’s widely referenced 1996 book, The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis, but it is incorrectly identified as Maud’s homestead in South Ohio, Nova Scotia.
While a few similar paintings by Maud have turned up (she was a serial artist after all), and from different periods in her life, this particular painting is “important,” suggests Deacon, because there’s so much in it and because it dates to the 1940s before Maud became famous, which wasn’t until 1965. “It’s so different than what she produced 30 years later. I love her early work because it’s so detailed.” It also bears the signature ‘M. Lewis’ – the rarest of her three signatures, according to Deacon. She signed “Lewis” on most of her paintings and “Maud.Lewis” towards the end of her life.
There’s a small piece of old tape on the back of the painting that reads, ‘Marian and Fred,’ but Deacon is “confident it is not Maud’s handwriting”.
Maud Lewis has been called one of Canada’s greatest folk artists. She was a self-taught artist, encouraged by her mother to paint. But she suffered from multiple physical challenges from early childhood on, including hands that became increasingly stiff and gnarled with rheumatoid arthritis. She lived in poverty during her adult life and never sold anything for more than $10.
Marian Porter, the recipient of the gifted painting, was a registered nurse and the first female Flying Officer in Canada to parachute in a 1951 Para Rescue course with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). She led a life of adventure while in the RCAF from 1951 to 1956 and completed over 26 jumps, some of which were part of rescue missions and mercy flights. When she died in 2023 at age 94, Maud’s painting went to her only child, Janie, who has always loved it and says she can still picture it “hanging in the hallways of every home I can remember”.
Janie says her late mother was an extremely humble woman throughout her life and rarely spoke about herself, including her accomplishments with the RCAF, or exactly how and under what circumstances she came to be gifted the painting. In fact, it wasn’t until much later in Marian’s life, and after a heart attack, that Janie and her family discovered a box of old clippings, one of which included photos of her that appeared in Time magazine, presumably in the 1950s. In 2024, the 100th anniversary of the RCAF, Janie and her family flew into Billy Bishop Airport on Toronto Island and were shocked to see enormous pictures of her mother in a parachute jumpsuit featured throughout the airport as part of an RCAF display.
Marian Porter, to whom Maud Lewis gifted the painting, was a registered nurse and the first female Flying Officer in Canada to parachute in a 1951 Para Rescue course with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).
Despite having to move into various care homes with increasing levels of assistance in later life, Marion always brought the Maud painting along. “It meant something to her, I think in part because I loved it,” says Janie. “And for me, it represented the fanciful and quirky parts of her – the parts that only her closest people would understand.”
But as time moves on, people pass away and priorities have a tendency to change. So does the significance we place on things. Janie decided it was time to let the painting go to someone new. “As long as it’s appreciated, that’s what matters most,” she says.
Despite the painting’s record-breaking selling price, Deacon says in the 1940s, “you’d have paid way less than a dollar and this would have taken Maud quite a bit of time.”
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.
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