Sculptor, born in Kew, Surrey, the youngest of the six children of John Charles Atkinson, a general practitioner, and his wife, Eliza. After a private school education at Carrington Lodge in Richmond, Atkinson attended the Royal Academy Schools, c.1878–c.1883. In 1878 he was awarded two silver medals: one, for the ‘restoration of a mutilated antique statue’, The Ilissos, and the other, for a ‘model of a figure from the life’; in both 1881 and 1882 he was awarded second prizes of £10 for a ‘model of a design’; and in 1883, the first prize of £30. While still a student, he modelled a bust of John Ruskin at Brantwood, Ruskin’s home in Cumbria; published in terracotta by Jabez Thompson of Northwich in 1881, one cast is at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and another was auctioned through Bonhams in 2008. Atkinson was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy from 1879 to 1891, contributing principally classical and historical subjects. He also contributed to the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions of 1880, 1889, 1890 and 1898, but although he continued to work as a sculptor, he seems to have stopped exhibiting after this period. The census of 1891 records him still living at his parental home on Kew Green with several grown-up siblings and his widowed mother (his father had died in 1882) but in 1893 he was in Warwick for his marriage to Jeanie Finlay Watson (they were two have two children, Grace, who died aged seven in 1905 and Edward, who was killed in action at the age of 22 on 4 November 1918). The couple were living in Richmond by 1901 and by 1911 had moved into 21 The Vineyard, their home for the remainder of their lives. Jeanie Atkinson predeceased her husband in 1937; by the time of the 1939 England and Wales Register, Arthur Atkinson was a retired sculptor living alone. He died, aged 82, on 6 October 1942. His only known outdoor sculpture is a statue of a young agricultural worker, entitled Out in the Fields. Atkinson exhibited its plaster model at the Royal Academy in 1890 and subsequently had it cast in bronze prior to its inclusion in the Victorian Era Exhibition at Earl’s Court, London, in 1897, and the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition in the following year, where it was offered for sale at £285. The bronze was acquired either then or at a later date by A.T. Hare who in 1929 presented it to the Ministry of Agriculture for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where it stands today.
Ancestry website sources: (i) for Arthur George Atkinson: England Censuses 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911, 1921; Marriage index, Warwick, 1893; England and Wales Register, Surrey, Richmond … 1939; England and Wales National Probate Calendar, 1943; (ii) for Jeanie Finlay Atkinson: Marriage index, Warwick, 1893; UK, World War One Pension Ledgers and Index Cards, 1914–1923; England and Wales National Probate Calendar, 1937.
Bibliography: A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts. A complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904 (8 vols, 1905–06), vol. 1 (Abbayne–Carrington), 1905, p. 75; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xvii, 250–51; Mapping Sculpture; The Times: (i) 12 December 1878, p. 6 (‘The Royal Academy of Arts’), (ii) 9 January 1930, p. 8 (‘Gift of a Statue to Kew Gardens’), p. 14 (photo of statue); Victorian Era Exhibition, 1837–1897. Catalogue, Fine Art Sections (Exhibition Buildings, Earl’s Court), 1897, p. 37, no. 467.
Terry Cavanagh, January 2026