Fri May 18, 2018 10:36 am
When Dowley was 34, she married Everett Lewis, a fish peddler from Marshalltown. According to Everett, Maud Dowley showed up at his door step in response to an advertisement he had posted in the local stores for a "live-in or keep house" for a forty-year-old bachelor. Several weeks later, they married.
They lived in Everett's one-room house with a sleeping loft in Marshalltown, a few miles west of Digby. Maud used this house as her studio. Everett took care of the housework.
Lewis and her husband lived mostly in poverty in the one-room house. After their deaths, the house was purchased by a local group. It was acquired by the province and transferred to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. They had the tiny house restored and it is now part of a permanent display on Maud Lewis and her works.
Maud Lewis accompanied her husband on his daily rounds peddling fish door-to-door, bringing along Christmas cards that she had drawn. She would sell the cards for twenty-five cents each. These cards proved popular with her husband's customers, and she began painting. Everett encouraged Lewis to paint, and he bought her her first set of oils.
She expanded her range, using other surfaces for painting, such as pulp boards (beaverboards), cookie sheets, and Masonite. Lewis was a prolific artist and also painted on more or less every available surface in their tiny home: walls, doors, breadboxes, and even the stove. She completely covered the simple patterned commercial wallpaper with sinewy stems, leaves, and blossoms.[/ color]
