Province bought three paintings in 1982, but only found out last September that they might be fakes
Months before the Nova Scotia government got proof that three Maud Lewis paintings it owned were fakes and said so publicly, the province had good reason to think they were not made by the famous Nova Scotia folk artist.
In an email, a worker at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia told a worker at Arts Nova Scotia, the group in charge of the Nova Scotia Art Bank, “These do look like fakes.”
Since it began in the mid-1970s, that program has bought 2,400 works by Nova Scotia artists, including what they thought were three paintings by Lewis.
In 1982, each of these paintings was bought at the Herring Gull Gallery in Chester, Nova Scotia, for $300, which was less than the going rate of $500.
Last September, CBC News told the province that the paintings might be fakes.
While doing research for a story about Lewis, the reporter found out about the possible fakes. Two of the possible fakes were hanging in the office of the prime minister.
The CBC wanted to look at the paintings with an art expert, but the province said no. Alan Deacon, the expert, would later help figure out that three paintings owned by the province were “not by the hand of Maud Lewis,” an artist whose works sell for as much as $350,000 today.
Even though the province didn’t find out for sure that the three paintings were fake until January 2023, a worker at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia wrote in September 2022 that she thought they were fakes.
Shannon Parker, the Laufer Curator of Collections at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, wrote in an email to an official from the Nova Scotia Art Bank on September 12, 2022, “I think they might be by [name redacted]. They’re not bad, and it would be easier to tell in person based on the paint and brushstrokes, as they are clearly based on specific Maud paintings.”
In a different email from the same day, Parker said that he thought the paintings could be used to teach.
Shannon Parker wrote to Lauren Williams in another email, “If nothing else, they’re still quite charming, and if they’re fakes, they’re a great way to learn.”
CBC News got the emails through an access-to-information request to learn more about what the province knew about the possible fakes.
When the CBC story came out on October 21, 2022, it said that there were questions about whether or not the Lewis paintings were real.
Even though the tests hadn’t been done yet, Williams seemed to have accepted that they were fakes.
“It’s going to be so expensive to replace these with real ones!” she wrote in an email to Briony Carros and Christopher Shore, who both worked for Arts Nova Scotia, the organization in charge of the art bank program.
In December, paintings were taken to be checked
Williams sent an email to Parker at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia on December 14, 2022, saying that the paintings had been given to Zwicker’s Gallery earlier in the week for authentication.
For the authentication, the Halifax gallery charged $175 per painting. After taxes, the total was $603.75, which is about two-thirds of what the province paid for the fakes in the first place.
On Jan. 5, 2023, one day before the province found out for sure that the fakes were real, CBC News found out the results of the examination and asked the province for comment.
Officials weren’t impressed.
“Alan Deacon’s contact with the reporter is so unprofessional. Ian Muncaster at Zwickers hasn’t even given us a report yet, but I’m sure he asked Alan for his opinion “said what Carros wrote in an email to Shore.
When the province got the results on January 6, 2023, the owner of Zwicker’s Gallery in Muncaster said that Deacon was consulted as part of the process of proving their authenticity.
Hungary could make more fakes
“They look like Maud Lewis, but they don’t have the things you’d look for in a real painting by her,” Muncaster wrote.
“As you probably know, someone has been making fake copies of Maud Lewis’s work since soon after she died in the summer of 1970. We think he has made somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 fakes that have been sold over the years, mostly through auction houses in many parts of Canada.
It’s interesting to note that several very good fakes of Maud Lewis paintings have recently been found in the United States. We think they were made in Hungary.
In an email sent to CBC Radio on January 9, 2023,Information MorningThe province refused to talk about the fakes in an interview. Instead, it sent a statement saying that the paintings “are probably not by Maud Lewis” and have been taken out of circulation.
MORE TOP STORIES