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Frances Anne Hopkins 1838-1919 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 ail who understand our North American wiidemess"Jheir fluid highways, and the voyageurs whose birch bark canoes sped ovedhem 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 nOiih and west until the transfer of Rupert's Land to the Dominion of Canada in /1870. !t 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 her European perception or the wilderness and Manitoba. Frar;rc~s Aluva Hopkins (1338~1919), as photographed by William Noiman in 1863, documented by oii, watercolour, and sketch the last days of the fur trade in Canada. Her narrative paintings, k.nown round the world, chronicle with [pinpoint accL'lracy every detail of the canoe, the voyageur and the mgged landscape of a vast cOlw:try which romantically appealed to a young lady transported from England, her birthplace, to a ilew land shortly after marrying Edward Hopkins in 1858. [Photo, courtesy Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of C.madian History] Bom Frances Anne Beechy in 1838, she married Edward Hopkins in Londoll, England, in 1858. A widower residing in Lachine, Quebec, with three children, Edward, an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company, returned vvith his bride to Canada, settling in the Montreal area. VVhen Frances witnessed the Grand Canoe Reception at Lachine given by Sir George Simpson for the Prince of \Nales in 1860, little did she know that the canoe would playa significant part in