Elisabeth Margaret Hopkins

Elisabeth Hopkins, a cousin of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the granddaughter of the painter Frances Ann Hopkins.[1] began painting during her childhood.[2] Trained as a nurse at Middlesex Hospital in 1916, she saw service in the World War II and in Canada, to which she moved in 1954, at a nursing home in Victoria, BC,[3] then at Victoria Veterans' Hospital. Afterwards, she ran an Anglican bookshop.[1] She retired to Galiano Island where she joined the Galiano Painters Guild[3] and afterwards moved to Saltspring Island.[1]

In the 1970s and 1980s, her watercolour paintings created from her imaginary world were exhibited at the Bau Xi Galleries in Vancouver and Toronto.[2] She illustrated and wrote a children's book, The Painted Cougar, published by Talon Books in 1977, which tells the story of Leon, a cougar in love with another cougar named Lurline.[1] In 1982, an exhibition titled The magical world of Elisabeth Hopkins was curated by Joan Stebbins for the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge.[2][1] She was the subject of a film made by Colin Browne for the National Film Board of Canada in 1984 titled Hoppy: A Portrait of Elisabeth Hopkins (Hoppy was her nickname to local residents in BC).[2] The Elisabeth Margaret Hopkins fonds is in the University of British Columbia Library Rare Books and Special Collections.