Canada by canoe

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

With the little Thomas Schultze discovered about Frances Anne Hopkins, he figured she deserved a book. “I was fascinated,” the Welsford man says of the work and life of the British woman, step-mother of three and mother of five more children – and painter of early Canadian fur trading, river and voyageur life. “Early North America was painted by Europeans – they wanted to record their impressions of this unbelievable country, with endless spaces, forests, rivers and nothing.”

For Schultze, growing up in Germany with a foreign set of children’s stories of the west, North American Indians and open spaces; coming across Hopkins’ painting, “Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior,” in a Calgary museum while taking a break from a foreign languages convention was an eye-opener. “Here were these canoes going into the unknown, and I noticed she had painted herself into the picture with a sketchbook in hand.”

While Schultze has spent his life teaching foreign languages and cultural programs in California, Montreal Ottawa, Vancouver and Bulgaria; he says a “lifelong interest in art and music history” was put to use as he traced the life of Hopkins. “She recorded what she thought was important, the daily life activities she saw from when she arrived as a young woman, from a protected, Victorian family.”

Hopkins married Edward Hopkins in 1858: he was in England, taking a break from work as a senior official in the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada.. She returned with him to Lachine, Quebec – the eastern fur trade’s business centre. She sketched the house and yard, the town, the river and its timber rafts and, over the next few years, accompanied her husband on outings by canoe with the voyageurs up the Ottawa River, the Lachine rapids and over Lake Superior. “It must have been very rough, and these voyageur types – they would have been rough,” Schultze says.

She was prolific in sketch and paints, and continued recording scenes she’d seen throughout the rest of her life back in England. But, she signed as F.A.H. and corresponded as F.A. Hopkins, her paintings disappeared into private collections and all Schultze could find in his research decades later was a catalogue from an old exhibition done by Canadian art historians. “There are two biographies being done now,” he says, and all the works but two he included in his book, “Frances Anne Hopkins, Image from Canada,” are in Canadian public galleries. “We’re very lucky. The work is great.”

Schultze was lucky as well, with the backing of the modern HBC for his manuscript. The Hopkins book was published in May, and has not been formally launched. It’s presentation could be at home Ottawa in the national archives, where the most well-known of Hopkins’ work – used now for generations as reproduced works, history textbook illustrations and prominent archives hangings since before 1920 – is carefully kept. “There were no diaries, no letters, no journals, no articles,” he says. “But think of her in a canoe, with watercolours and just dipping her brush over the side….”

Local launch

Thomas Schultze will share his love and learning of the work of Frances Anne Hopkins in a local book launch, hosted by the Berwick Library Saturday, November 22 at 3 p.m.

Friends are welcome to come see Hopkins’ work on slides and listen to some of the stories of her life – and the work Schultze did to compile his book, “Images from Canada.”