Have one like this?
Upload a photo for a free check of what yours may be worth.
Lot description
GEORGE MOUNSEY WHEATLEY ATKINSON (1806-1884) The Fleet Getting Away from Cork Signed Oil on canvas, 83.5 x 131cm Atkinson was born at Queenstown (Cobh), County Cork to English parents and lived in the Cork area for most of his life. His early years were spent as a ship’s carpenter and he was later appointed Surveyor of Shipping and Emigrants at Cobh. Apparently self-taught, it has been assumed that Atkinson did not take to painting until later in life. However, his Boating Party in Cork Harbour of 1840 (Crawford Art Gallery, Cork), which shows a recreational boating outing, already shows considerable skill. A year later he exhibited five works representing ‘different views of our noble harbour of Cork, in storm, in calm, in haze and in sunshine, together with brigs, schooners, cutters and steamers in every position and circumstance’ at the inaugural exhibition of the Cork Art Union. In 1849 the artist held an exhibition in a pavilion at Cohn to mark the Queen’s visit and his Visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Queenstown was lithographed an published by W. Scraggs of Cork while a Volume of Sketches of Norway, Taken during a Yachting Cruise in the Summer of 1852 was lithographed by his son and published by Guy Brothers, Cork. Another of his sons, Richard Peterson Atkinson was also a landscape and marine painter until his premature death aged twenty-six. Between 1842 and 1870 Atkinson exhibited twenty-one works at the Royal Hibernian Academy; interestingly only the very last exhibited was for sale. He died at his home in Cobh in January 1884. This is one of the largest and most ambitious of Atkinson’s views of shipping in what was his life-long subject, the ‘noble harbour of Cork’.