An artist of rare ability and penetrating vision travelled the highways of the voyageurs in the middle of the last century sketching as she went. It is time that her sketches, paintings, and engravings should be brought to the attention of all who understand our North American wilderness, their fluid highways, and the voyageurs whose birch bark canoes sped over them in days gone by. For she, perhaps best of all early artists, has preserved the voyageur and his habitat most beautifully and at the same time most accurately.

The fur trade in Canada – an aggressive, expansionist, hierarchical regime – dominated the north and west until the transfer of Rupert’s Land to the Dominion of Canada in 1870. It has been depicted as a man’s world of native trappers, canoemen, clerks, and post managers, with only recent recognition of the role of both Native and European women in the trade. Frances Anne Hopkins, artist, wife, and mother, captured the essence of the canoe brigades in the decade before 1870 and dramatically documented her European perception of the wilderness waterways between Montreal and Manitoba.
 

Frances Anne Hopkins (1838-1919), as photographed by William Notman in 1863, documented by oil, watercolour, and sketch the last days of the fur trade in Canada. Her narrative paintings, known round the world, chronicle with pinpoint accuracy every detail of the canoe, the voyageur and the rugged landscape of a vast country which romantically appealed to a young lady transported from England, her birthplace, to a new land shortly after marrying Edward Hopkins in 1858. [Photo, courtesy Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History]

Born Frances Anne Beechy in 1838, she married Edward Hopkins in London, England, in 1858. A widower residing in Lachine, Quebec, with three children, Edward, an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, returned with his bride to Canada, settling in the Montreal area. When Frances witnessed the Grand Canoe Reception at Lachine given by Sir George Simpson for the Prince of Wales in 1860, little did she know that the canoe would play a significant part in her personal discovery of Canada. This was particularly true after she accompanied her husband on inspection trips after he was appointed Chief Factor in charge of the Montreal Department for the HBC in 1861.

Her canoe voyages became a window to several facets of Canadian life: the commercial lumber and fur trades, native life, and, most importantly, the role of the canoe. In 1869 she joined her husband on a leisurely canoe voyage from Thunder Bay to Montreal. Her documentary approach has been celebrated among historians, but only recently have her artistic skills been recognized and critically acclaimed. She painted in a British topographical landscape tradition and was influenced by John Ruskin who upheld the virtue of painting with a freshness of colour, boldness of conception, truth to nature, and originality of theme.

Art historian Robert Stacey has observed that Hopkins’ vision and popularity foreshadowed a nationalist school of Canadian art. By painting Canadian subjects with the life and vitality of experience, Frances Anne Hopkins became “... a painter who captured something fundamental to a place, a people, and a way of life that nobody had looked at so closely or so lovingly before.”

Hopkins rejected the Romantic Movement’s preoccupation with the lone hero. Rather, her canvasses capture the notion of cooperation, not competition, on the canoe voyage, where group effort was necessary and vital. She also populated the wilderness with people, a human element lacking in the depiction of pristine nature by other contemporary artists. She also inserted her own authentic experiences into a scene and its action, unlike other contemporary women painters in England such as Lady Elizabeth Butler, who won fame for depicting wars she did not see. In the male world of the fur brigades, she was unique for her participation and her rendering of images of the past that few cared to record. She shares with William Armstrong and Paul Kane an important role as being among the first Canadian artists to paint the upper lakes region and the West. Stacey argues, “Her works need to be rescued from the dusty vaults of historical illustration, archival documentation, and sociological inquest and restored to their proper place: the repository of the living imagination.”
 

Painted in 1879, “Shooting the Rapids,” a dramatic oil on canvas, captures the essence of a thirty-six-foot long freight canoe being steered through treacherous white water by 16 voyageurs. The four passengers in the middle, side by side, include Edward and Frances Anne Hopkins. [Photo, courtesy National Archives of Canada/C-2774]

The canvasses of Frances Anne Hopkins record for posterity a realistic portrait of the world-famous canoe brigades and lumber raft scenes of Canada’s legendary waterways before such canoe travel, as a primary commercial system of transportation, succumbed to railways and before photographers replaced artists in documenting life in the wilderness theatre. Her images are far better known around the world than she as an artist in her own and adopted countries.

The north, the wilderness, the canoe and the fur trade help define a great deal of Canada’s early history and are topics venerated by readers around the world, most of whom are familiar with the authentic and stirring images painted by Frances Anne Hopkins. An adventurous, stimulating, and creative artist, she, with such other women artists as Emily Carr, Paraskeva Clark, Peggy Nicol McLeod, Lilias Torrance Newton, Prudence Heward, was an imaginative interpreter of the Canadian experience.

Larry Turner