Cromwell ‘would have been Canadian art icon’

Cromwell lived in Weymouth for most of his 88 years, and was famed for his with pen and ink drawings, many of which portrayed people and scenes he had known.

“He would have been a Canadian folk art icon had the public seen the scope of his work, especially the larger pieces that were quite significantly different than his smaller works,” says David Woods, an associate curator of Black Nova Scotian art at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

Cromwell’s major drawings documented his life and time, and it was their social significance that elevates them beyond the simpler if more colourful works of Maud Lewis, another Digby County artist, he said.

While Cromwell often made fairly simple drawings on whatever scraps of paper he could find—including Chinette paper plates—his larger pieces were quite elaborate works of social commentary and historical perspective, Woods said.

“What was needed was a signature show that showed the full variety of his work.”

Woods tried to set up a just such a show at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s gallery in Yarmouth two years ago, but it never came off for a number of reasons, he said.

Among the problems, he said, was the reluctance of a local collector to make the drawings available for public exhibition.

“It is very unfortunate that during his lifetime Cromwell never had the recognition that he was due. But that will come.”

Woods noted a collection of about 45 Cromwell works was advertised a month ago on eBay for a starting price of $15,000. He tried to interest the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, but it pleaded lack of funds.

In a Courier story last August, then reporter Jonathan Riley interviewed Cromwell who explained that his folk art career started in a military hospital in Debert during the Second World War.

Wounded overseas, he spent several months recovering and started drawing to pass the time.

“Oh I drew some naughty things there – some of them were a little raw,” he said with an impish giggle. “Whatever you can imagine, I drew it. Oh they were raw.”

Soon he was drawing portraits for the nurses and doctors and with nothing else to do, he got looking out the window and drawing what he calls scenes, or landscapes.

After the war, he worked as a commissionaire, as a cooks’ helper and in the early 1950s he spent five years in Sudbury working in a nickel mine. Back in Weymouth, he worked as a school janitor among other jobs.

“ I was jumping here there and everywhere,” he recalled.

After retiring, he had more time for drawing and turned a lot of his effort to depicting his home of Weymouth Falls and Weymouth as he remembers it.

“It all just comes out of my head. I’ve got a couple scenes I’d like to paint yet,” he told Riley. “Things I saw.”

His funeral service was held Saturday in St. Matthew's Anglican Church in Weymouth Falls.