sketches during the festivities, which she later developed into large watercolours at the request of the Prince of Wales (later known as King Edward VII of the United Kingdom) for hanging at Windsor Castle. Throughout her time in Canada, Hopkins accompanied her husband on many of his voyages, especially after Edward was promoted to Superintendent of the Hudson's Bay Company's Montreal department. In Montreal, Hopkins joined Edward on several of his tours of inspection of his fur-trade posts, which stretched from the Mingan District to Fort Williams, Ontario. Travelling by canoe was becoming less common in Canada as railroads developed and improved, but travel to and from remote trading posts on the Great Lakes was still often by canoe. On these voyages, and on trips she took for pleasure, Hopkins sketched and recorded her experiences and her surroundings. With her husband's support for her and her art, Hopkins was able to independently travel by canoe, which was very rare for women to do at the time. As a result of this, she became one of the only female artists to be directly involved in the canoe voyage scene. Hopkins took several trips between the years of 1858 and 1870, accompanied by her husband, to places such as Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, and Kakabeka Falls near Lake Superior. She took the opportunity to sketch while on these voyages and eventually turned many of her sketches into the voyageur paintings she is associated with today. Hopkins and her husband also made short visits to England, where she exhibited her work, and vacationed in France. In 1869, Hopkins and her husband took a farewell tour of Lake Superior, as retirement from the Hudson's Bay Company was approaching. In 1870, Hopkins became the first woman to show a large body of work at an exhibition in Montreal. Later that same year, the Hopkins family moved back to England permanently without two of their sons, as one died in 1864 and the other in early 1869. Artistic career Frances Anne Hopkins' (née Beechey) was already a skilful artist at the time of her marriage to Edward Hopkins in 1858. Growing up in an upper-middle-class family, it is probable that she would have been provided with tutoring in the fine arts, specialising in education in drawing and painting. However, there is no confirmed documentation of this. The Beechey family was already a well-known family of