Christmas with Maud Lewis

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Maud Lewis (1903–1970), the unassuming folk painter who became known
as “Canada’s Grandma Moses,” lived in Digby County, in Nova
Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, for most of her life. In the 1950s, Lance
Woolaver’s parents began commissioning and collecting her paintings
and Christmas cards. The colorful reproductions that appear in Christmas
with Maud Lewis have been taken from their impressive collection.

Woolaver, author of the award-winning Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis
(1996), produces an insightful and sympathetic portrait of Lewis in the
book’s introduction, which concludes with this passage: “To most
people, Maud was almost unknown, and the truth of her life remains
elusive. ... To Marie Wells, she was the crippled girl in school she was
told not to look at. And what were we? We were the great and wonderful
world Maud painted and wanted to join, but could not. ... I like to
think that in the enjoyment of this book we can at last come
together.”

After her mother’s death in 1937, Maud married Everett Lewis, a fish
pedlar, and moved to his tiny wooden house in Marshalltown—the house
she would eventually cover, inside and out, with her cheerful, colorful
paintings. Woolaver concludes his text with Lewis’s own commentary on
her life and work: “I don’t copy much. I guess my work up. I don’t
go nowheres. I’m contented here. ... As long as I’ve got a brush in
front of me, I’m all right.”