Arthur Atkins was a tonalist landscape painter who emigrated to San Francisco as a young child. He was essentially self-taught, but studied briefly at the San Francisco School of Design

San Francisco Art Institute

San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...

. His paintings were shown at the Vickery, Atkins & Torrey

Vickery, Atkins & Torrey

Vickery, Atkins & Torrey was an interior design firm and art gallery in San Francisco, California, that helped introduce California to Impressionism...

 gallery and at his Jackson Street studio, both in San Francisco, and his paintings sold well. His brother, Henry Atkins

Henry Atkins

Henry Atkins may refer to:* Henry Atkins * Henry Atkins * Sir Henry Atkins, 3rd Baronet of the Atkins Baronets* Sir Henry Atkins, 4th Baronet of the Atkins Baronets...

 and his uncle, William Kingston Vickery

William Kingston Vickery

William Kingston Vickery was an Irish-American picture dealer who founded the San Francisco interior design firm and art gallery of Vickery, Atkins & Torrey...

 were co-founders of the Vickery, Atkins & Torrey art gallery.

Between 1897 and August 1898, Atkins visited England and France and studied art in Paris. He was mostly influenced by the paintings of Edouard Manet

Édouard Manet

Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....

 and James McNeill Whistler

James McNeill Whistler

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...

 while in Europe.

Atkins' favorite landscape subject were the rolling hills near Piedmont, across the bay from San Francisco. Atkins' works are very rare due to a fire at his San Francisco studio in the 1890s, further losses in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and his premature death at age 25.

A book of Atkins' notes and letters, from his visit to Europe, by A. M. Robertson and Bruce Porter

Bruce Porter

Bruce Porter was an American painter, sculptor, stained-glass designer, writer, muralist, landscape designer and art critic.-Biography:...

, was published in 1908.

¹ Various sources give Atkins' place of birth as either Queen's Ferry, England or Egremont, Cheshire

Egremont, Merseyside

Egremont is an area of the town of Wallasey, on the Wirral Peninsula, England. It is bordered by New Brighton to the north, Liscard to the west and Seacombe to the south.-History:...

, England.

Works - Partial List

• Piedmont Valley (1895)
• Piedmont Hills (1896)
• Landscape (1896)
• Piedmont (1896)
• Pines: St. Hospice (1897)
• The Marne: Charenton (1898)
• The Basin: St. Cloud (1898)
• Charenton (1898)
• Penarth Pier (1898)

Source

• California Art Research, Vol V (1937), Work Projects Administration
• The Letters of Arthur Atkins (1908), A. M. Robertson and Bruce Porter
• Art in California (1916), Bruce Porter, Porter Garnett, et al.
• Artists of the American West, Vol III (1985), Doris Ostrander Dawdy
• Artists in California 1786 - 1940 (1989), Edan Milton Hughes

External links

• Arthur Atkins : extracts from the letters; with notes on painting and landscape; written during the period of his work as a painter in the last two years of his life, 1896-1898, 1908 from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
  Archives of American Art
  The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 16 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washington, D.C...