Key Works

Maud Lewis painted from memory and her imagination, but she also used found images that she adapted to her own style. She repeated subjects when she determined that one was particularly popular, often making dozens of versions of the same scene, and over her lifetime she painted hundreds of works, often at a pace of two or three a day. Because of the serial nature of so much of her work from the 1950s onwards, this section explores the key themes of her paintings throughout her career. They reveal Lewis’s delight in an imagined environment and yearning for the past as well as the evolution of her style and drive to create a personal world, one that culminated in a masterpiece, her painted house.