AFTER LEAVING HIS architectural career behind him aged forty-seven Atkinson1 became an artist, spending the next seven years (1847–53) travelling almost 40,000 miles – possibly the greatest travels by any artist – particularly in Siberia, but also the Urals and today’s Kazakhstan, returning with ‘many hundreds of clever watercolour drawings … most valuable as representations of places hitherto unknown to Europeans’.2 His own total was ‘560 sketches of the scenery’,3 i.e. an average of eighty a year, perfectly possible for sketches, although improbable for finished watercolours, particularly the large sizes he favoured. He certainly spent three days on one. His journals (now held at London’s Royal Geographical Society) mention at least thirty for 1847 and eleven for 1848; they list for the years 1849–1852 respectively 109, twenty-eight, fifty-four and two, a total of 234, i.e. less than half his own total given above.
The subjects were usually remote and picturesque landscapes, and, sadly, most of the finished watercolours have been lost or are now unidentified, probably because his works are mostly unsigned, his style and he himself forgotten, his Russian scenes unrecognised in England. Only eight bear signatures (one on the reverse), one a monogram, and in three other cases his signature is appended with a date to long captions possibly in his own hand, but only on separate strips of paper the width of the painting – all too easy to mislay or destroy.
With so few paintings known, it is not surprising that he is today an unremembered figure, with brief references perhaps in many art encyclopedias, but totally omitted, for instance, from the Grove Dictionary of Art (thirty-four volumes, 41,000 articles), 1996, and the 753-page Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists, 2000. Yet in his lifetime Atkinson became a celebrity back in England, albeit as ‘the Siberian traveller’ rather than ‘artist’, after the publication of his first and very successful book Oriental and Western Siberia. But his paintings merit attention: large watercolours of wild and sublime nature, scenes of grandeur: ‘rushing torrents, roaring waterfalls, precipitous crags, unattainable mountain peaks’.4 He was a true romantic topographical artist (although he also portrayed the Kazakh way of life, including portraits of sultans), along with Caspar David Friedrich and nineteenth-century American landscape artists such as Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) or Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), who also painted ‘unknown territories’ but largely in oils.5 Yet engravings of his work – a medium which overtook watercolours in the later nineteenth century – seem very rare despite the many engravings in his two books.
Dramatic landscapes and, often, skies were his scene and, as a former stonemason, rocks and geological formations were his prime subjects. It is not known who, if anyone, influenced him, as most of his painting was done in Russia. Maybe he had seen the exhibition of Turner’s watercolours in London (1819–20). In Russia, watercolours developed in the eighteenth century, although mainly for architectural drawings, and in the next century the brilliant Bryullov and others worked in watercolours as well as oils, with the best-known landscapes produced by Alexander Ivanov.
He may well have been the first topographical artist in Siberia and Kazakhstan, although the earliest known images of the former are possibly those published in the late seventeenth century by the Danish diplomat Ysbrandt Ides and the French Jesuit Philippe Avril (who probably briefed artists after their return). The eighteenth century brought two artists, Johann Christian Berkhan and Johann Wilhelm Lürsenius, as part of the academic detachment of Bering’s Great Northern Expedition, although cartography was then inevitably more important than topography, which seems to have been limited to distant views of towns.
Did Atkinson, like Bierstadt, invent subjects to a large extent, ‘incorporating characteristic elements of the region rather than depicting identifiable places’?6 In three surviving cases, at least, he surely did not, for the very detailed captions he added to them, identifying exactly what he was painting, will scarcely have permitted any artistic licence. Possibly the same holds for many others of his paintings, although no other similar captions are known to exist. However, his subject matter is still generally so remote that it remains an open question and, according to one Siberian historian,7 Atkinson was prone to exaggerate scale, particularly by the size of the conifers he often depicted atop great cliffs – an Atkinson ‘trademark’. Yet the implausible geological formations, as in his painting of Lake Kolyvan in the Altai, feature in old guide books as a famous sight. And if his paintings are indeed the first representations, exaggerated or not, of these isolated scenes as he claims in his preface, they surely merit a better place in – particularly Russian – art history.
Born in 1799 of humble parentage in a Yorkshire village, Atkinson was seen to have artistic talent when young and graduated from a stone quarry, carving stone and helping architects, to a successful career in architecture himself (see Appendix I). Aged thirty, he published Gothic Ornaments,8 a folio of fine lithographs by himself and his half-brother, Charles. He was to exhibit four times at London’s prestigious Royal Academy and, failing to win a competition for a major church in Hamburg,9 travelled on to St Petersburg to begin a new career as a topographical watercolourist with an ostensibly ‘open passport’ requested from Nicholas I. He had sent the Tsar forty-nine drawings (synonymous with watercolours then) of ‘English views and architecture of Italy, India, Egypt, Greece’, where he had apparently travelled, perhaps on the run from his creditors, but the Hermitage considered them ‘lacking the quality’ expected of English watercolours, although deserving some attention, so the Tsar bought none.
St Nicholas, Lower Tooting, watercolour by TWA
Hough Hill Priory, Stalybridge
Designed by Thomas for David Cheetham; demolished. Watercolour by TWA exhibited R.A. 1832.
Atkinson’s style was to improve, crucially helped by Winsor & Newton’s ‘invaluable’ moist colours utilising glycerine’s moisture-retaining properties, which he was able to use ‘on the sandy plains of Central Asia, in a temperature of 144°F (62.5°C); and in Siberia … frozen as solid as a mass of iron, when the temperature was 11° below the point where mercury becomes solid’.10 The air temperature is exaggerated11 but Winsor & Newton’s watercolour boxes once bore a testimonial that their colours had survived Atkinson’s extremes of temperature. Perhaps his pencils originated from Alibert’s mine,12 if not from Borrowdale; his paper may have been English (popular in Russia together with French paper at the time), and we do not know if he was using sable brushes, which would have been appropriate since the sable is native to Siberia.
Observatory proposed to be erected at Kersal Moor, Salford, Manchester
Designed by Thomas but never built.
Now forty-eight, he spent the first year of his travels (1847) in the Urals, the Altai and ‘the Kirghis steppes’, today Kazakhstan, and returned to St Petersburg where he presented Nicholas I with twelve small watercolours (now in the Hermitage) of his expedition down the picturesque Chusovaya river in the Urals. The next year he married – bigamously – Lucy Finley, a twenty-nine-year-old English governess in St Petersburg, with whom he travelled for the next six years, with many adventures through the most scenically dramatic parts of southern Siberia and Kazakhstan. It was the mountain scenery that primarily attracted him: the Altai, Eastern Sayan and the Tien Shan’s adjoining Alatau, after which they named the son born to them en route, with whom they travelled thereafter and who astonishingly survived.
Self-criticism was not in Atkinson’s nature. But, self-confident, he was a romantic with talent, charm, egotism – and determination. Lucy later wrote of him: ‘my husband does not permit impossibilities without proving them to be so’.13 Through her connections in St Petersburg, they visited many Decembrist exiles in Siberia, including Nikolai Bestuzhev, a talented artist himself, well known for the fine watercolour portraits of his fellow Decembrists.14 Atkinson used sketchbooks, presumably small, as they travelled much on horseback through difficult terrain, across rivers and sometimes in ‘torrential rain’. It was in the long spells in Irkutsk and Barnaul (and later St Petersburg) that he worked up his pencil sketches into finished watercolours.
They returned to Russia’s capital finally in December 1853 and remained there for two years, Atkinson probably writing his first book and preparing watercolours for two albums which, for reasons unknown, were never published. He became increasingly anxious for Alexander II (the new Tsar) to see his watercolours, stressing the size – up to 213 by 142 cm: ‘some of much greater dimensions than have ever been attempted in watercolour paintings15… from regions never before sketched or even visited by any European’.16 Eventually the Tsar did see them and ‘was much pleased’17 but bought none; neither, apparently, did the Russian state. Atkinson must have been hugely disappointed but aimed at least to exhibit seventy-three finished paintings for a few weeks before he sent them to England, where they were shown at Colnaghi’s, a leading London art dealer, in late 1856 – no sale records survive – and at the Royal Geographical Society in 1857.
Returning to London with his family in that year, he published the first book of his travels, Oriental and Western Siberia, 611 pages illustrated with twenty colour lithographs and thirty-two wood engravings – omitting all mention of wife and son. He dedicated it to Alexander II, who rewarded him with a diamond ring. The book, a great success, brought him fame, lectures and election to the Royal Geographical Society and the Geological Society. Four successive sales of a total of seventy-four watercolours took place at Christie’s between 1858 and 1863 but with varying results.18 His second book, Travels on the Lower and Upper Amoor, 1860, with no lithographs but eighty-three engravings, brought a second ring from the Tsar, but later proved to be in part a plagiarism of a recent Russian geographical work.19 The title (foisted on him by his publishers?) is distinctly dubious, as is the title-page lithograph of the Amur, since Atkinson seems never to have been in the area and writes about it almost entirely in the third person. He is not known to have painted again – he was a traveller rather than an artist, travel really being his forte. When he died in 1861, Lucy was left virtually penniless, as any money went to Rebekah, Atkinson’s first wife. Lucy published two years later her own (wonderful and absurdly neglected) account of their Siberian travels, Recollections of Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants, with five unattributed engravings, perhaps taken from her husband’s work.
Today all but forty-one of Atkinson’s watercolours have disappeared without trace. See the catalogue raisonné below for the survivors, which comprise, among others, sixteen in Russia (twelve of them in the Hermitage), four in London’s Royal Geographical Society, one in the Victoria and Albert Museum, one in the Harris Museum Art Gallery, Preston, two in Athens and fifteen in private British collections. Eleven of these last were bought in 1997 by a London dealer at a Christie’s sale of contents from Raby Castle, Yorkshire. They were identified only a year or two later by chance.20
How to quantify Atkinson’s total – including the lost – oeuvre? We know he intended to send seventy-three watercolours back to England from St Petersburg and brought back from Siberia ‘many portfolios of sketches’;21 to the Christie’s total of seventy-four we should add seven colour lithographs in his first book, making eighty-one plus a watercolour of the river Hook (see LA p. 307) and another of Kopal in the ‘Kirghis steppes’ sent to Prince Gorchakov, Governor-General of Western Siberia, ‘I believe the first water-colour… [of] this part of Asia’.22 These two at least are probably still in Russia, and perhaps some of the Colnaghi/Christie’s watercolours have returned there too.
Dr Galina Andreeva, curator of the 1997 Unforgettable Russia exhibition in Moscow’s Tretyakov Museum, asked all the Russian Federation’s museums to notify her of any Atkinsons, but only two (in Krasnoyarsk) were added to the list.
To these can be added a possible fourteen more of the Chusovaya River as indicated by Atkinson’s numbering system23 – neither lithographs in Atkinson’s first book nor in Christie’s sales. There is one more, which exists only as a photograph of a dramatic mountain scene (the Altai?) in London’s Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute; it is indubitably in T.W. Atkinson’s style, not J.A. Atkinson’s as attributed; but provenance, date and scene depicted are all unknown. This brings the total to ninety-eight, of which sixty-six – almost two-thirds – are lost. But even then, this does not take into account the Colnaghi’s sale or what may have been sold (or presented) in Russia. And it is impossible to tell whether the 115 engravings in his two books and the five engravings in Lucy’s book (unattributed, but likely to be from her husband’s work) are from drawings or finished watercolours. But if the last, the total of missing paintings would be even higher.
Where the rest are is a mystery. A small pile of watercolours certainly perished many years ago in a fire that destroyed a grandson’s house on Hawaii, but they were apparently flower paintings, not his subject at all. Could they have been by Lucy? But there are no indications that she ever painted.
How good was Atkinson as an artist? Vivian Mantel-French, a distinguished contemporary watercolour painter,24 regards him as extremely talented and says: ‘He produced really beautiful paintings rather in the style of John Sell Cotman, using flat washes, and his sense of atmosphere and interest in shapes is well before his time. He was very intelligent regarding the shape of the land, understanding it as a former stonemason and architect, and portrayed it with sensitivity and a beautiful atmosphere. He achieved his effects through glazes with a limited palette, and much of his work was done in a studio from sketches which is why he achieves such accuracy.’
His legacy is now hardly appreciated, but perhaps one day he will earn recognition even on the basis of the paintings which survive. It is greatly to be hoped that more will be discovered.