Maude Lewis was born in Ohio, Yarmouth Country, Nova Scotia. She started painting Christmas cards with her mother and then sold them on the streets of Yarmouth. When her parents died she went to live with an aunt in Digby, Nova Scotia.

In 1938 she married Everett Lewis and moved to a small one-room cabin near No.2 Highway west of Digby, at a place called Marshalltown. Her husband sold fish from village to village and she sometimes sold some of her cards. He encouraged her to paint and bought her artist's supplies and cut small pieces of plywood that would allow her to paint with her polio-afflicted arms and arthritic condition. She passed her days painting in the doorway of her house and people began to know her and to buy...