Maud Lewis Painting Theft
Folk artist Maud Lewis from Nova Scotia didn’t get to enjoy fame or riches from her paintings during her lifetime. In the past few years, however, her work is gaining popularity and as the value of the pieces go up, sadly, so does the likelihood of theft.
Maud Lewis
First, some background on the artist herself. Lewis was born on March 7, 1903 in South Ohio Nova Scotia. She was born with some birth defects which resulted in her developing rheumatoid arthritis at a young age. As a child her mother had her paint Christmas cards in watercolours that she would sell for 5¢ each. This was her first introduction to art.
After her parents passed away, in 1937, she went to live with her aunt in Digby. Shortly after this she answered an ad to be live in help for a man named Everett Lewis. A few weeks after her arrival at his house in Marshalltown they were married. They lived mostly in poverty in a one room house in Marshalltown where they traveled door to door selling fish and Maud’s painted cards. The cards proved to be very popular and Maud started selling them as well as paintings out of their home. Everett encouraged Maud’s painting and even bought her her first set of oil paints. She painted on every surface she could find, including the interior walls of their home and household objects/appliances.
Most of her paintings feature the same subject matter as she kept coming back to things like landscapes, cats, and cows which sold well. Many of her paintings are small because she didn’t have a lot of mobility in her arms and therefore physically couldn’t create a large piece. She continued to sell paintings out of her house, until her death in 1970, for $5-$10.
The Theft at Hand
In Digby, Nova Scotia there are a few quaint holiday cottages. One of which has two Maud Lewis paintings in the primary bedroom flanking the window. The subject of these paintings were the same, a pair of oxen, however, one depicted them in the winter surrounded by snow and in the other it is summer and they are surrounded by tulips. Montrealer Jill Prescesky, who rents this cottage, noticed immediately they were gone on her arrival in June 2021 which means they were stolen between September 2020 and June 2021.
The police were called and the theft was reported. What is interesting to them was that first this is a very safe community where people don’t even really lock their doors so a robbery of any type is unusual. Second, that typically in a robbery the whole house is turned upside down but in this case nothing was touched but the paintings. The thief knew what they were looking for and knew where to find them.
These paintings are valued now at around $80,000. The value of Lewis’ work has been increasing dramatically in recent years with one estimate saying that her best and largest paintings could top six figures soon.
One of the main theories that the RCMP are currently exploring is that the art was stolen to be sold on the black market. Unfortunately, there are an increasing number of people who want art by specific artists badly enough that they can ignore where the paintings came from or how they were obtained. These paintings also frequently are moved out of the country making cases like this difficult to solve.
The community surrounding the cottage is rampant with theories and speculation with some saying it had to be someone local who knew where to find the works. While others think that it had to be someone from far away because break-ins had never been a problem before.
This theft has sadly caused others in the area who have original Lewis’ in their cottages to lock them away or sell them to avoid their homes being broken into.
In Canada, there is a unique issue with stolen art especially since there is no dedicated team or taskforce with the expertise required for art crimes, like in the USA, there is also no national stolen art database so it is hard to keep track of which pieces are stolen and which one should keep their eyes out for.
Sadly, these paintings have not yet turned up and because of the long time period in which the crime could have been committed, giving the thieves a huge head start, some fear that these paintings are gone for good.
Works Cited
Mercer, Greg. “How Two Stolen Maud Lewis Paintings Brought the Art World’s Black Market to a Nova Scotia Town”. The Globe and Mail. 2022. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-how-two-stolen-maud-lewis-paintings-brought-the-global-black-art/