James Hopkins studied at the Cincinnati Academy of Art under Frank Duveneck and in 1903 went to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Colarossi. After a year in Paris, he returned to Cincinnati to marry Edna Boies. The couple traveled to China, Japan, Ceylon, and Egypt and then settled in Paris, remaining until 1914. Hopkins was an associate member of the Société National des Beaux-Arts. While in France, his work was influenced by Impressionism and by the Orientalism of James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
After his return to Cincinnati, Hopkins took a studio in Cumberland, Kentucky. There he concentrated on character and genre subjects reflecting the life of the region. Although he romanticized the characters somewhat, he was a forerunner of the Regionalists in his focus on the particular nature of mountain life and the qualities of its people: stoicism, stamina, and taciturnity. In 1915 the Friends of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago's patrons group, presented Hopkins's A Kentucky Mountaineer (c. 1915) to the museum. As well as producing such works, he continued throughout his career to paint in his more elegant Orientalist and Impressionistic manner.
Hopkins taught at the Cincinnati Academy of Art from 1914 to 1919. In 1923 he was appointed chairman of the department of fine arts at Ohio State University, Columbus, and in 1943 was named director of the university's school of fine and applied arts. He retired in 1947.
His awards include the Walter Lippincott Prize from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1908); a bronze medal at the Buenos Aires International Exposition (1910); and a gold medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco (1915). Hopkins received the Thomas B. Clarke Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1920.
Exhibitions of his work were held at the Ohio State Museum, Columbus, in 1943 and at the Columbus (Ohio) Gallery of Fine Arts in 1948.
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