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.

"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 that oversees the art bank program.

Paintings were taken for authentication in December

A Dec. 14, 2022, email from Williams to Parker with the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, said the paintings were dropped off to Zwicker's Gallery earlier in the week for authentication.

The Halifax gallery charged $175 per painting for the authentication. With taxes, the total came to $603.75 — roughly two-thirds the amount the province originally paid for the fakes.

One day before the province received official confirmation on Jan. 6, 2023, of the forgeries, CBC News learned the results of the examination and contacted the province for comment.

Officials weren't impressed.

"It's so unprofessional for Alan Deacon to reach out to the reporter. We haven't even received report back from Ian Muncaster at Zwickers, but I assume he reached out to Alan for an opinion," said an email from Carros to Shore.

When the province received the findings on Jan. 6, 2023, the owner of Zwicker's Gallery, Muncaster, noted Deacon was consulted as part of the authentication process.

New fakes may be coming from Hungary

"While they are plausible images, they do not bear the features that one looks for in authentic paintings by Maud Lewis," Muncaster wrote.

"As you are probably aware, there has been a forger of Maud Lewis's work who has been working since shortly after her death in the summer of 1970. We estimate that he has produced somewhere in the order of 1,500 forgeries, which have been distributed over the years, mostly through auction houses in many parts of Canada.

"It is interesting to note that recently several very good forgeries of Maud Lewis paintings have turned up in the United States, that we believe are being produced in Hungary."

In a Jan. 9, 2023, email to CBC Radio's Information Morning, the province declined an interview to discuss the fakes. Instead, it sent along a statement, noting the paintings "were deemed likely not to have been painted by Maud Lewis" and have been removed from circulation.