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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 topographica!landscape tradition and was influenced by John Ruskin who upheld the virtue of painting with a freshness of colour, boldness of conception, twth to nature, and originality of theme. d,.~ Art historian Robert Stacey has observed that Hopkins' vision and popularity foreshadowed a nationalist schoo! of Canadian art. By painting Canadian subjects vvith the !ife and vitality of experience, Frances Anne Hopkins became "... a painter who captured 'Somethjn!~ fundamental to a place, a people, and a way of lite that nobody had looked '30 1'",. .06'=',18," . Hopkins rejected the Romantic Movement's lone hero. Rather, her canvasses capture the notion of cooperation, not competition, on the canoe voyage, where group effort V\fas necessary and vital. She also populated the wilderness with people, 8 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 contemporanj 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 dthe past that few cared to record. She shares with VVilliam 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 ofthe living imagination."