N.S. government got duped buying 3 Maud Lewis paintings. Here's how they learned the truth

Months before the Nova Scotia government received confirmation that three Maud Lewis paintings it owned were fakes and admitted it publicly, the province had good reason to believe they were not painted by the famous Nova Scotia folk artist.

"These do look like fakes," an official with the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia wrote in an email to an official with Arts Nova Scotia, the organization that oversees the Nova Scotia Art Bank.

That program has purchased 2,400 works by Nova Scotia artists since its inception in the mid-1970s, including what it believed to be three Lewis paintings.

These paintings were purchased from the Herring Gull Gallery in Chester, N.S., in 1982, for $300 each, which was below the market rate of $500.

The province became aware the paintings might be fake last September because of CBC News.

The broadcaster had learned of the potential forgeries while doing research for a Lewis story. The potential fakes included two hanging in the premier's office.

CBC requested to view the paintings in the company of an art expert, but the province declined. That expert, Alan Deacon, would later be part of the process that determined three paintings the province owns were "not by the hand of Maud Lewis," whose works sell for as much as $350,000 today.

While the province received official word in January 2023 the three paintings were fake, an Art Gallery of Nova Scotia official wrote in September 2022 that she thought they were forgeries.

"I speculate that they're possibly done by [name redacted] they're not bad and in person it would be easier to tell based on the paint and brushstrokes, as they are clearly derived from specific Maud paintings," Shannon Parker, the Laufer Curator of Collections with the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, wrote in a Sept. 12, 2022, email to an official from the Nova Scotia Art Bank.

In a separate email from the same day, Parker saw the paintings as a teaching tool.

"If nothing else, they're still quite charming and if they're fakes, they're a great educational tool," Shannon Parker wrote in another email to Lauren Williams.

CBC News obtained the emails through an access-to-information request to find out more about what the province knew about the potential fakes.

When the CBC story published on Oct. 21, 2022, the article noted there were concerns around the authenticity of the Lewis paintings.

While the authenticity evaluation hadn't taken place, Williams seemed resigned to the fact they were fake.