Covered Bridge 1964 Maud Lewis Giclee Print | Nova Scotia Folk Art | Canadian Winter

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This covered bridge scene was painted in 1964, the year Maud Lewis's life transformed forever—though she didn't know it yet. In February of that year, Halifax freelance journalist Cora Greenaway conducted a CBC Radio interview with Lewis for the program Trans-Canada Matinee. When it aired across the country, something shifted in the Canadian consciousness. Letters began arriving at the tiny Marshalltown cottage. Strangers appeared at the door, not just asking to buy paintings but wanting to meet the woman whose cheerful art had captured their attention. At age 61, after twenty-six years of painting in obscurity from her corner of a one-room house, Lewis was suddenly becoming known. The orders came in so fast that the paint hardly had time to dry—you can still find fingerprints on the edges of paintings from this period, evidence of works shipped before they fully cured.
Yet when Lewis painted this covered bridge scene in 1964, she was still charging two or three dollars per painting, still using boat enamel scrounged from local fishermen, still working on boards Everett cut for her from whatever materials they could afford. The national fame would come fully in 1965 with the Star Weekly article headlined "The Little Old Lady Who Paints Pretty Pictures" and the CBC Telescope documentary crew arriving at her door. But 1964 was the threshold year, the moment before everything changed, captured in this winter scene of sleighs passing through covered bridges toward villages that glowed with color against white snow.
Lewis returned to covered bridge compositions throughout the 1960s because they held deep meaning for Maritime culture—these wooden tunnels weren't merely functional infrastructure but communal landmarks, shelters against winter weather, gathering places for sleigh traffic along rural routes. By 1964, covered bridges were already vanishing from Nova Scotia's landscape. The province's last would be torn down before the decade ended, replaced by modern steel and concrete spans that handled heavier traffic and wider vehicles. Lewis painted them as elegy without sentimentality, recording what she knew in her bones was disappearing: the rhythm of horse-drawn sleighs, the dark passage through wooden shelter, the village waiting at journey's end with smoke rising from chimneys.
The composition shows Lewis's mature style fully developed. Three sleighs move through the scene at different points in their journey, creating narrative momentum. The covered bridge itself anchors the center, its dark interior contrasting dramatically with surrounding snow. Evergreens frame the composition with verticality, their deep green establishing depth against the winter palette. True to her technique, Lewis painted without shadows or atmospheric perspective, creating instead a flattened decorative space where every element—bridge timbers, horse teams, village houses, forest trees—shares equal visual importance. The colors remain pure and unmixed, applied straight from the tube in her characteristic rectilinear brushstrokes, the stiffness in her arthritic hands becoming her signature rather than her limitation.
What makes this 1964 painting particularly poignant is its timing. It captures Lewis painting the same subjects she'd painted for decades, unaware that within months her relationship with her art would fundamentally change. For twenty-six years she had painted for love and pocket change, creating images that pleased her and might sell for enough to buy groceries or cigarettes. After 1964, she would paint under pressure to fill orders, to meet demand from strangers across Canada who wanted their own piece of Nova Scotia folk art. The spontaneous joy would persist in her work, but it would be tempered by arthritis that made each brushstroke more difficult and by the burden of unexpected fame in the last years of her life.
Our museum-quality Giclee reproduction preserves Lewis's boat enamel technique with archival precision—the unmixed colors, the arthritis-shaped brushstrokes, the folk art directness that refused sophistication. Printed on acid-free paper using fade-resistant inks, this reproduction honors both the painting's visual qualities and its historical significance as a work created at the threshold of recognition.
This print speaks to collectors who understand that the most meaningful art often emerges from the margins, that genius doesn't require formal training or institutional validation. It resonates with those who appreciate Maritime history, covered bridge heritage, and the particular Canadian story of an artist who spent most of her life unknown before achieving recognition in her final years. For homes seeking artwork that connects personal creativity with cultural documentation, this 1964 covered bridge offers passage between obscurity and fame, between anonymous craft and recognized artistry. It's winter pastoral and historical marker, folk masterpiece and time capsule, painted in the year everything changed for a woman who simply wanted to keep a brush in front of her and be all right.