The incredibly bright future of Maud Lewis

Chad Brown looks anxiously at Sandy Cove, a colour-packed painting of Digby Gut created by Nova Scotia artist Maud Lewis. He just travelled to Ontario to pay $40,000 for it. Now, he must sell it.

The current record price for a Maud Lewis was set in November 2021, when Train Station In Winter fetched $67,250. 

"Many people agree that good, strong works of Maud's will crack $100,000-plus over the coming few years. It's not if, but when," he says.

"We are in a generational shift where more paintings are being passed down and those are surfacing. And when you have more paintings surface, you start to see different images and better images. So it's fair to say that Maud's best paintings are yet to be seen." 

Brown started acquiring Maud Lewis works a few years ago, a passion born of a childhood in Digby, N.S., but during the pandemic, he became a full-time dealer of her paintings. 

Lewis, who lived in the village of Marshalltown outside Digby and died in 1970, sold paintings for $2 to $10 during her lifetime, which would equal about $20 to $100 today with inflation. They rose to about $1,000 in value by the 1990s and kept climbing.

But in the years since the 2016 movie Maudie, which was based on Lewis's life and won seven Canadian Screen Awards, prices for the paintings have "exploded," Brown says. "Every auction is breaking a new record."

Brown says a Maud painting that cost $10,000 a few years ago could go for $30,000 today. A few months ago, Brown issued a standing offer: he'll buy any Maud Lewis you care to sell.

He's bought more than 30 original paintings over the last few years and resold most of them. That means he's putting tens of thousands of dollars on the line, in the hopes that he will resell for a margin that keeps him in business.

"Ultimately I'm very fortunate to be in Nova Scotia, where there are lots of Maud Lewis experts that I can tap into. I can send an email, send a text, send pictures, and double-check before I buy anything. The price of paintings now are so high that if I'm spending $30,000 on a painting, it doesn't matter if I think it's authentic or not. If it doesn't pass an expert's opinion, then I can't buy it."

But the established authentication experts in Nova Scotia are aging out of the profession, just as the price of her work rises, creating tension between the desire to buy an authentic Maud, and the fear of getting caught short with a fraud. 

To combat that, Brown often travels across Nova Scotia and increasingly across Canada to examine paintings in person before buying them. "I sit down with people for hours on end, talking about how they bought the painting, how much they paid for it, their experience with Maud, and I keep that with the painting," he says.

But he can't keep the paintings. He must find someone who wants Sandy Cove even more than him. 

Alan Bamberger wrote The Art of Buying Art and has been buying and selling art in San Francisco since 1978. He wasn't particularly familiar with Lewis before CBC News contacted him, but he looked into her career.