Finding Franny

On a seventy-day canoe trip, I traced the journey of a Victorian painter

- NAOMI HARRIS

DURING THE 1860s, British painter Frances Anne Hopkins accompanied her husband, a high- ranking official with the Hudson’s Bay Company, on at least three excursions with voyageurs. Hopkins sketched the daily life of the fur traders and, upon her return to England, produced largescale oil paintings whose accuracy provides an unparalleled glimpse into this chapter of Canadian history. Despite exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Arts, in London, she always signed her work “fah” —  effectively concealing her identity in a male-dominated art world that typically excluded women.