Frances Anne Hopkins

Who was Frances Anne Hopkins?

Frances Anne Hopkins was an English painter. She was the daughter of Frederick William Beechey. In 1858, she married a Hudson's Bay Company official, Edward Hopkins, whose work took him to North America. She accompanied him and travelled extensively by canoe along some of the most important fur trading routes. While traveling, she sketched extensively and thereby recorded an interesting aspect of Canadian history.

Her best-known works are several large paintings made from her sketches. They show voyageurs and their canoes with her husband and herself in with the paddlers.

Hopkins returned to England in 1870 where she lived until her death. She was a member of the North British Academy of Arts. Many of her paintings are part of the collection of the National Library and Archives of Canada. In 1988, a stamp was issued featuring one of her paintings and an inset sepia photograph of the artist.

Thomas Schultze has written an extensively annotated book of Hopkins's work, which was published by Penumbra Press in spring 2008.

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Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall, 1869, by Frances Anne Hopkins

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Voyageurs at Dawn, 1871 by Frances Anne Hopkins