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Finds and Interests
Our WorthPoint Price Guide updates daily, with thousands of new items streaming in from our Industry Partners. I like to try to single out a few of my favorites to share with our followers. There’s usually a good story behind so many of these pieces, and sharing my passion for antique and vintage items is the best part of my job. Let me tell you about an interesting item that one of our partners recently auctioned.
WorthPoint is based in Atlanta, GA, but we still appreciate hearing from our Industry Partners in other parts of the world. Recently, our colleagues at Miller and Miller held the Post-War Canadian Folk Art Auction that included several paintings by Maud Lewis. Lewis was known for her simplistic depictions of country life in Nova Scotia. She was born in South Ohio, NS, and lived there until her parents died in the mid-1930s. She moved briefly to Digby, NS, and then to Marshalltown, NS, after marrying Everett Lewis, a local fish peddler.
Maud was born with some physical challenges, which resulted from juvenile arthritis. Despite the challenges, her mother encouraged her in art, and she began painting Christmas cards for her husband’s customers. She would join him on his rounds, selling the cards for 5 cents each. She branched out into painting and covered the walls of her home with her work, creating country scenes on any available surface.
Notably, four of the top five pieces sold at the Miller and Miller auction were works by Lewis. Probably her most well-known work, a fall landscape painting titled “Bear River from Above,” is a perfect example of her style—it features rich autumn tones of gold and copper on the trees, along with a few small cottages and the river. It sold for $27,354.35. Another of her works, titled simply White Cat, was in the top five, fetching a price of $23,566.82. The cat is believed to be Maud’s cat, Fluffy.
Lewis’s work did not make her famous or wealthy during her lifetime. Her home was on Highway No. 1, the main road around Nova Scotia, and she would sit outside and sell her paintings for just a few dollars. The home is now part of a folk exhibit at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. When you consider the challenges of living in near poverty with a physical disability, it’s impressive that she produced some of the best paintings in the Canadian folk art scene. Lewis died in Marshalltown, NS, in 1970, and nine years later, burglars, who were attempting to rob their house, murdered her husband, Everett.