19th Century Engraving of Fur Trade Canoes
As long-time appreciators of the fur trade era paintings masterfully created by the artist Frances Anne Hopkins (1838-1919), we were delighted to find this large-scale, 1873 Limited Edition engraving (now sold) of her famous 1869 painting Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior.
The original painting (now in the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta) is 27” high x 48” wide, while the engraving is 19” high x 30” wide, so it is about two-thirds the scale of the original.
With a large framed size of 31.5” high x 42.5” wide, the engraving has a presence that captures attention in a room setting—especially the attention of anyone fascinated by tales of the arduous and adventurous lives of fur trade voyageurs.
The engraving showed its nearly 150 years of age when we first discovered it. Because it is such an appealing and rare image done by a known master engraver, we had if fully restored by an art conservator who specializes in works on paper. With a new acid-free mat and quality frame glazed with non-reflective museum glass, it is now well protected for the next 150 years.
The Artist and the Scene
Frances Anne Hopkins was an accomplished artist who grew up in an upper-middle-class British family of distinguished artists.
Frances Anne Hopkins, 1863 (image by William Notman, McCord Museum, access #I-8274)
But her artistic talent alone is not what makes her such an important figure in art history—she was also a barrier-breaking wilderness traveler (albeit in the company of extremely competent guides) who documented the waning years of 19th century voyageur traditions.
Her adventures began in 1858 when at age 20 she married widower Edward Martin Hopkins, secretary to the Hudson's Bay Company Governor-General, and returned with him to Canada where he helped oversee fur trade operations. They lived in the Montreal area for 12 years before retiring back in England in 1870.
Hopkins’ watercolor of her home on Cote des Neiges near Montreal, dated 1862 (photo: Vero Beach Auction)
While managing the expectations of her social position in Montreal, maintaining a large house, being stepmother to three children and bearing five children of her own (three of whom survived past infancy), Frances Hopkins also accompanied her husband on canoe voyages. This was made possible thanks in part to Edward’s moral and financial support that enabled Frances to hire people to help with her domestic responsibilities so she could keep up her artistic endeavors.
When Edward was promoted to Superintendent of the Hudson’s Bay Company Montreal department, Frances accompanied him on several long canoe tours to inspect his fur-trade posts which stretched from the Mingan District (north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Quebec) to Fort William (on Lake Superior near Thunder Bay, Ontario).
The Travels of Frances Anne Hopkins, 1859-1869. ©MaryEllen Weller Smith, 2014
Traveling in birch bark canoes guided by voyageurs, the couple visited wilderness outposts such as on the Mattawa River in Ontario, Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, and the northern Lake Superior regions of Kakabeka Falls and Fort William.
On these canoe voyages, Frances sketched scenes that she later transformed into large oil paintings in the studio she maintained near London in Hempstead, which became her full-time studio once the family moved back home to England.
Hopkins is credited with creating an important record of voyageur lifestyles, attire, traditions and equipment in a time before photography was in widespread use.
The type of canoes they traveled in was the canot du maître or Montreal canoe, the largest of the native Algonquin Eastern Woodlands canoe designs used by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Some were up to 40’ long and were paddled by a crew of 10-12 men and portaged by four. These canoes could carry a load of three tons including people, gear, provisions and furs.
Shooting the Rapids by Frances Anne Hopkins, 1879 (Library and Archives Canada/C-002774)
Hopkins liked to depict herself and her husband nestled safely in the center of the canoe, as she did in Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior.
Detail from engraving of Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior
A detail (below) from her 1869 painting titled Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall, shows a voyageur picking a waterlily to pass up to Mrs. Hopkins who is seated beside her husband at the center of the canoe, tucked into blankets with additional waterlilies on her lap.
(Library and Archives Canada/C-002771)
While her paintings presented a somewhat romanticized image of voyageurs’ actual tough lives—they typically paddled and portaged for 14 hours a day and frequently faced treacherous high waves and rocky rapids in vulnerable birch bark canoes—Hopkins’ work nevertheless created a valuable ethnographic record of a way of life that was soon to disappear as canoes gave way to steamships and railways for transporting Hudson’s Bay Company goods throughout the Canadian north.
Voyageurs at Dawn by Frances Anne Hopkins, 1871 (Library and Archives Canada)
The Engraver and the Medium
In the 18th and 19th eras before photography became common, line engraving was a popular means of reproducing great paintings so the images could be appreciated and owned by the general public.
Engravers were artists in their own right, as it took great skill to translate the brushstrokes of a painting into lines on a metal block that when inked and pressed upon with paper would create a near facsimile to the original painting.
The Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior engraving was created by Charles Henry Mottram (1807-1876), a master British engraver who lived and worked both in London and New York.
Mottram worked mainly in the medium of steel engraving using line, stipple and mezzotint techniques, often mixing those styles on a single plate as he did in this fur trade canoes engraving.
Hopkins’ portrayal of a fog-saturated scene was well-suited to reproduction as a black and white engraving.
The painstaking process of accurately engraving a large and detailed image into steel was extremely time-consuming, so the resulting prints could be expensive in their day and the best ones retain their value today.
Befitting the detailed execution of Mottram’s engraving of the Hopkins painting, the printing of the engraving was also top quality, done by the high-end art dealer M. Knoedler & Company.
M. Knoedler & Co. was a New York City art dealership founded in 1846 as a branch of the famed French art publishing house Goupil & Cie (founded in 1827) which subsequently sold their New York division to their employee Michel Knoedler in 1857.
In addition to the publisher’s credit, the engraving also includes a raised seal, called a blindstamp, of the Printsellers Association. This guild of influential publishers, the first fine arts trade association, was established in 1847 to regulate the quality of prints as well as to control and authenticate Limited Editions.
The three letter code in the center of a blindstamp, such as this one on Mottram’s engraving, was unique to each copy of a Limited Edition and indicated the numerical order in which it was printed.
Finally, there is also a copyright notice beneath the engraving that reads: Entered According To Act Of Congress In The Year 1873; by M. Knoedler & Co. In The Office Of The Librarian Of Copyright at Washington.
After 1870 many of the prints which bear this particular legend were deposited in the Library of Congress, so it is likely that a print from this edition of the engraving of Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior resides in the Library’s collections of the Prints and Photographs Division.
Legacy
Hopkins’ Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior was her first painting to be shown at the prestigious Royal Academy in London in May 1869. She had 10 more exhibitions at the Royal Academy during her career, with the last one held in 1902 just 17 years before her death at the age of 81.
Mottram’s image of the painting is a tangible reminder of Hopkins’ legacy as an accomplished artist and documentarian, while having significance in its own right as an historical engraving produced just four years after she completed the painting.
Artistic legacy extends from cultural to personal significance when living with an artwork invites escape into daydreams. This engraving is a portal into imagining the travels of dauntless fur trade voyageurs paddling majestic birch bark canoes throughout a vast network of northern wilderness waterways.
We could probably all benefit from a physical reminder each day that the beauty and power of nature await our visit, perhaps via canoe.
