Hopkins, Frances Anne, 1836-1919 : Frances Anne Beechey was born in 1838, the daughter of Rear Admiral Frederick William Beechey, celebrated Arctic explorer, and his wife Charlotte Stapleton, and the grand-daughter of the Court portrait painter Sir William Beechey, R. A. (1753-1839) and his wife Anne Phyllis Beechey (nee Jessop) (1764-1833/4), a well-known miniature painter in her own right. Coming from an artistic family, Frances Anne was probably taught painting at home, because she was an accomplished artist by the time of her marriage in 1858, at the age of 20, to Edward Martin Hopkins (1820-1893), a widower with three children, who was the Secretary to the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, Sir George Simpson.
Mrs. Hopkins moved to Canada with her husband in the same year as her marriage, settling in Lachine, Quebec, where she had two sons by 1861. In that year, the couple and their children moved to a house on Cote des Neiges, near Montreal, where they had one more child by 1863. In spite of having to care for six children, Mrs. Hopkins was able to take short canoe trips with her husband and the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company on tours of inspection of Company posts, during which she began to record the life of the voyageurs. In 1864, she went on an extended trip to the Upper Great Lakes, when she may have travelled as far as Thunder Bay and Marquette, Michigan.
She used her travels and the sights of the great canoe flotillas arriving at Lachine each fall in her art work, which she began displaying at Canadian art exhibitions from 1860 onwards, and after her return to England in 1870, in Royal Academy exhibitions from 1869 to 1918. One of her paintings, Running The Rapids on the Mattawa River, was used as an illustration in Sandford Fleming's Ocean to Ocean, published in 1873. Another work was engraved for publication in 1873, Canoes in a Fog on Lake Superior, by M. Kneodler & Co. of New York.
Mrs. Hopkins continued to paint Canadian subjects for the rest of her life, after her return to England. One of her stepsons was the celebrated Victorian poet, Edward Manley Hopkins. Upon her death in 1919, her estate was sold at auction, and four of her paintings of canoe travel, including Shooting the Rapids; Canoe Party Around Campfire; Voyageurs at Dawn; and Canoe manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall; wer acquired by the Public Archives. Her artistic output can also be found in such institutions as the Glenbow Museum, Calgary; Royal Ontario Museum and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; McCord Museum, Montreal; Minnesota Historical Society, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and elsewhere.
The Painted Past (Ottawa, Public Archives of Canada, 1984), cat. nos. 25-26; A Place in History (Ottawa: National Archives of Canada, 1991), cat. no. 21.
