"He wanted to promote her, help her, but also I'm sure he was in business for himself to also make money, and this is where he needed her to raise the price for her real paintings," Bill Ferguson said. It cost more than that to have the prints made by a local silkscreen artist and each one of them was priced around $15-$25. Lewis was still selling her original paintings for around $5 in the early 1960s. Part of that agreement stipulated that Ferguson and Ten Mile House couldn't sell their silkscreens in Lewis's county of Digby, Bill Ferguson said.īut there was a problem with this business venture.
He said the other agreement, which he remembers being written by a lawyer in Truro, gave his dad the copyright to use Lewis's images on the silkscreens. Willard Ferguson and Claire Stenning co-owned the Ten Mile House gallery in Bedford, N.S., where they sold original Maud Lewis paintings, as well as silkscreen prints. He bought everything that he could fit in his car. "When it comes to silkscreens, it's as close to an original as you're going to get and I think that that's what he wanted," said the entrepreneur from the Halifax area.īrown, who bought his first silkscreen print on eBay a few years ago, discovered more than 200 prints at a Ferguson family estate in October. He died more than a decade ago, and his contribution to promoting Lewis's work before she was famous has become a mere footnote. Willard Ferguson, an artist and gallery owner, worked out an agreement with Lewis to reproduce nine of her images beginning in the early 1960s. The vintage prints, some of which were made by hand when Lewis was still alive, aren't original paintings, but rather depict the beloved artist's now iconic images - from the oxen in front of rows of tulips to the three black cats.
A Nova Scotia art collector has discovered hundreds of forgotten Maud Lewis silkscreen prints and is sharing the little known story of the man behind them.
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