Maud Lewis St Anne Ferry Giclee Canvas Print | Bay of Fundy Maritime Art | Nova Scotia Folk Art | Canadian Steamship Painting | 1958

Details

In 1958, from her tiny painted house beside Nova Scotia's Highway No. 1, Maud Lewis watched the steady rhythm of ferry traffic crossing the Bay of Fundy between Digby and Saint John — white steamships threading through the notorious Digby Gut, their smoke trailing across water that connected her isolated Marshalltown community to the wider world. St Anne Ferry captures this essential artery of Maritime life with Lewis's distinctive palette of bright blues, cheerful reds, and emerald greens, transforming routine transportation into joyful folk art.

The painting depicts a white steamship ferry — likely the SS Princess Helene, which served the Digby-Saint John route from 1930 to 1963 — steaming across brilliant blue water flanked by forested hills. Seagulls wheel overhead in characteristic Lewis fashion, rendered as simple white crescents against sky and sea. In the foreground stands a white house with bright red roof, framed by dark evergreens and a yellow deciduous tree that defies season, embodying Lewis's famous habit of painting "four seasons all at once." The composition radiates the optimism and vitality that made Lewis's work beloved even as she hunched over boards in constant arthritic pain.

By 1958, Maud Lewis had been painting seriously for nearly two decades, having evolved from selling five-cent Christmas cards door-to-door with her fish peddler husband Everett to producing oil paintings that attracted tourists stopping at their roadside home. Her signature appeared in the lower right corner — "LEWIS" in capital letters — a mark of growing confidence in work that sold for just two or three dollars per painting. She would not reach even seven to ten dollars until the final years of her life.

Lewis painted what surrounded her in Marshalltown — a hamlet just miles west of Digby, positioned where land, sea, and forest met in constantly shifting configurations. The ferry service she depicts was no mere scenic element but economic lifeline. The Princess Helene, if indeed the vessel shown, was an elegant Scottish-built ship with 43 staterooms and crew uniforms modelled on the Royal Canadian Navy. Each day she crossed turbulent Fundy waters carrying 500 passengers and 50 automobiles, connecting Canadian Pacific Railway's eastern terminus at Saint John with the Dominion Atlantic Railway at Digby.

Maud's house sat strategically beside Highway No. 1 — Nova Scotia's main tourist route — making the Lewis home itself a roadside attraction. Travellers arriving via the Yarmouth and Digby ferries passed directly by, many stopping to purchase paintings displayed in the window. The ferry traffic Maud observed from her doorway brought not just commerce but customers, transforming her isolation into unexpected opportunity. Americans and Canadian tourists disembarking from ferries fuelled the postwar tourism boom that would eventually make Maud Lewis a household name.

Her technique in St Anne Ferry demonstrates the method she perfected through necessity and repetition. Working on inexpensive beaverboard or pulpboard cut by Everett, Maud first coated the surface with white paint. She then sketched her composition in pencil before applying Tinsol oil-based paint — often scrounged boat enamel and house paint donated by local fishermen — straight from the tube without mixing or blending colours. Her arthritic hands, increasingly gnarled and limited in range of motion, produced characteristically rectilinear brushstrokes. She could not execute loose, flowing gestures, so she developed a style that celebrated bold, direct application of pure colour.

The shadowless world Maud created was both stylistic choice and physical limitation. Her paintings present reality simplified and brightened, stripped of darkness both literal and metaphorical. The white ferry gleams against blue water. The house glows white against green hills. Trees stand as solid blocks of colour — dark evergreens, bright yellow deciduous, all equally vibrant regardless of impossible seasonal combinations. This was Maud's gift: transforming the Maritime landscape she knew intimately into visions of unshakeable cheerfulness.

Ferry service featured repeatedly in Lewis's work because ferries were everywhere in her world — the Princess Helene crossing to Saint John, the Yarmouth ferry bringing Americans to Nova Scotia's southwest shore, the countless smaller boats working Digby's fishing harbour. These vessels represented connection, movement, the outside world arriving at isolated communities. For someone whose arthritis confined her increasingly to one small room, ferries symbolized freedom she could paint but never fully experience.

The white house with red roof anchoring St Anne Ferry's foreground evokes the countless similar structures dotting Nova Scotia's rural landscape — simple, sturdy, painted in cheerful colours against long grey winters. Whether depicting a specific house Maud knew or a composite memory of Maritime domestic architecture, it grounds the composition in human habitation. This is working landscape, not wilderness — people live here, ferries serve them, seagulls scavenge their wharves, trees frame their homes.

By 1958, Maud had refined her compositional strategies through serial repetition. She returned to successful subjects again and again, varying details but maintaining proven formulas. Maritime harbour scenes with boats, houses, trees, and birds appeared dozens if not hundreds of times across her career, each iteration fresh despite familiar elements. Customers wanted Lewis's optimistic coastal visions, and Maud obliged with inexhaustible variations on beloved themes.

The painting captures a moment of transition in Maritime life. By the late 1950s, the shipbuilding industry that once fuelled prosperity in Yarmouth and Digby had long declined. Farming was mechanizing, displacing horses and oxen Maud loved to paint. Ferry service represented modernity arriving — automobile tourism replacing older modes of travel — even as Lewis's art celebrated a rural world rapidly disappearing. She documented this vanishing Maritime landscape not with nostalgia but with persistent joy, finding brightness in change rather than lamenting loss.

St Anne Ferry stands as testament to an artist who transformed limitation into distinctive style, isolation into connection with thousands of admirers, and the ordinary maritime landscape of Digby County into paintings that now sell for tens of thousands of dollars at auction — a far cry from the few dollars Maud received during her lifetime, carefully counting payment before shipping two paintings to the Nixon White House, pragmatic to the end.

**WHAT SETS ICHOR PRINTS APART:**
✓ Giclee ink pigments ensure 100+ year fade resistance
✓ Colour accuracy that rivals the original folk art masterpiece
✓ Advanced digital reproduction captures Lewis's signature direct-application technique and vibrant unmixed colours
✓ Investment-grade artwork for serious Canadian folk art collectors
✓ All Gallery Mount Prints include Certificate of Reproduction Authenticity and artist biography affixed au verso

**ICHOR PRINTS PRODUCT OPTIONS:**

**Gallery Mount** (Image: 12"x16" | Frame Exterior: 19"x23")
Giclee Fine Art Print on archival paper
Protected by 16"x20" acrylic glaze
2" heavy Snow White Mount with .5" fine white/grey margins
Choice of Burnished Gold, Bombay Mahogany, or Obsidian Black hardwood frame
Ready to hang

**Float Frame Canvas** (Canvas: 16"x20" | Frame Exterior: 19"x23")
Giclee pigment canvas stretched over hardwood
Set within Obsidian Black float frame
Creates stunning dimensional depth
Ready to hang

**Studio Canvas** (16"x20")
Stretched over premium hardwood bars
Perfect minimalist presentation
Ready to hang or custom frame
Gallery-wrapped edges

**Loft Poster** (Image: 12"x16" | Paper: 16"x20")
Fine Art Paper with 2" pure white margin
Perfect for custom framing
Affordable museum-quality option
Ready to display

Bring home the ferry painted from a roadside cottage where Canada's beloved folk artist captured the Bay of Fundy's essential rhythm — steamships connecting isolated Maritime communities through waters she knew by heart but rarely crossed herself.