Virtual Tour: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia takes Maud Lewis exhibit online

The Maud Lewis house, where the late folk artist lived and painted for years in rural Nova Scotia, is one of the enduring displays at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax on Nov, 19, 2007. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan)

HALIFAX — Like other museums and galleries, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia is closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite the closure, the gallery continues to showcase visual arts through virtual tours of its exhibitions, including the Maud Lewis Gallery.

Maud Lewis was a Nova Scotia folk artist whose colourful, lively paintings of rural life gained her national and international recognition towards the end of her life and in the decades after her death in 1970.

Her works largely feature sights she would have seen around her tiny home in Marshalltown, near Digby, N.S. Some feature landscapes: a snow-covered ground with oxen pulling sleds full of logs, or an idyllic coastal village with seagulls flying overhead.

In addition to her paintings, there is another surviving relic of her artwork: the tiny house she lived in, which she famously adorned with colourful paintings of flowers and wildlife.

The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia is home to the largest public collection of Maud Lewis works in the world, including her house, which was sold to the province and turned over to the art gallery in 1984.

The gallery’s virtual tour allows viewers full access to the Maud Lewis Gallery and the Maud Lewis Painted House.

Viewers are able to navigate the gallery at their own pace by clicking the circles on the floor to move throughout the room. They can also zoom in on artwork and interact with the coloured dots for information on individual pieces.

With files from The Canadian Press.