The Painted House of Maud Lewis: Conserving a Folk Art Treasure

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Fame came too late for Maud Lewis. Although this Nova Scotian folk
artist achieved a measure of recognition within her lifetime, it was not
enough to relieve the extreme poverty in which she lived and died. For
32 years, Lewis produced her joyous primitive paintings while living in
a one-room shack lacking a foundation, insulation, plumbing, and
electricity. Even these conditions, coupled with only the basics in
food, clothing, and artist’s supplies, could not crush her spirit.
When she lacked boards on which to paint, she painted on any flat
surface available to her—the doors, windows and walls of her hut, the
woodstove, breadboxes, stair risers ... even the dustpan.

This book is an account of the salvage and restoration, by the Art
Gallery of Nova Scotia, of Lewis’s little house. It is rich in details
of the deteriorated condition in which the building and artifacts were
found, the strategies applied to restore them to the condition in which
Lewis would have known them, the materials and methods used, and the
tools and people involved.

The work is vivid with color photos of Maud’s artwork, house, and
possessions as they were both during her lifetime and when the
restoration project started, and of the present installation of the
painted house in its entirety inside the art gallery. These are
supported with many black-and-white shots of the restoration in
progress, showing the conservators’ techniques.

A glossary and an index add to the book’s value as a reference for
museum staff and amateur historians serious about saving complex
artifacts for posterity.