Frances Anne Hopkins
Images from Canada

Thomas Schultze
Jim Burant, introduction

10 X 8 inches, 120 pages

CANOES IN A FOG, Lake Superior by the young Frances Anne Hopkins has become a recurring symbol of the Canadian mystique, a visual shorthand for the complexities of the country's colonial and fur-trader past. But though this work and others by Hopkins have been lodged firmly in the Canadian psyche, the same cannot be said of the artist.

In 1858 twenty-year-old Frances Anne Beechey married Edward Martin Hopkins, a high-ranking official with the Hudson's Bay Company. On several occasions during the next decade she accompanied her husband on canoe tours with the voyageurs, travelling the routes of the fur trade and capturing the twilight of canoe travel with sketches, watercolours, and oils.

This book offers a much-needed look at the oeuvre of a highly gifted and unjustly neglected woman artist, bringing together all of her work with a Canadian theme that is accessible to the public at many galleries and museums, among them Library and Archives Canada, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Glenbow Museum.