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Ina Uhthoff was a Scottish-born artist who trained at the Glasgow School of Art. She first came to Canada in 1913 to visit friends in the Kootenay region of British Columbia, and while there she met her future husband, Ted Uhthoff.

Ina returned to Scotland and worked as a teacher. Then, after the First World War, she reunited with her husband—to–be, married, and settled in Crawford Bay, a hamlet on Kootenay Lake in the interior of B.C. As Christina Johnson–Dean notes in this fifth book in the Unheralded Artists of B.C. series, although Uhthoff found the area pictueresque, the work of a pioneer wife with two young children left little time for her artwork.

In 1923, she mapped out her move from the region. Perhaps Uhthoff desire a more urban setting. As the Victoria Daily Colonist later reported, she “resumed her career after her marriage owing to the fact that her husband was incapacitated by wounds received in the Great War.”

Ina and Ted never divorced but saw each other infrequently. By 1925, she had established herself in Victoria with employment at the Summer School for Teachers while single–handedly raising her children and working as a practising artist.

Much of the remainder of the book concentrates on Uhthoff’s great diversity as an artist and on her passion to teach and promote art. Most notably, she established the Victoria School of Art and was a key figure in the creation of what was to become the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. The many beautiful drawings, paintings, and photographs allow readers to look further into both Uhthoff’s life and her art.