Who is Thomas Witlam Atkinson?

Thomas Witlam Atkinson (1799–1861) was an English architect, artist and traveller in Siberia and Central Asia. Between 1847 and 1853 he travelled higher than 40 000 miles through Central Asia and Siberia, much of the mature together behind his wife Lucy and son Alatau, who was born during their travels. He afterward painted and documented his travels in two books that are today regarded as travel classics. His and Lucy’s son, Alatau Tamchiboulac Atkinson, born on 4 November 1848 in what is now Eastern Kazakhstan, was named after the famous Tamshybulak Spring in the town of Qapal at the foot of the Djungar Alatau mountains.

He was born in Cawthorne, near Barnsley, West Riding of Yorkshire in 1799. He began to learn his trade at the age of eight, working next door to his father, who was a stonemason at Cannon Hall, home of the Spencer Stanhope family. By the era he was twenty he was a stone-carver, and in that faculty executed some great work on churches at Barnsley, Ashton-Under-Lyne and elsewhere. At the last-named town he granted for a even though as a intellectual of drawing. Soon after he became clerk of works to a string of important Victorian architects, including George Basevi, who expected much of Belgrave Square in London.

About this time he devoted himself to the assay of Gothic architecture, and in 1829 published a folio volume entitled Gothic Ornaments prearranged from the alternative Cathedrals and Churches in England. In 1827, he went to London and conventional himself as an architect in Upper Stamford Street, Blackfriars. Among his works at this epoch was the church of St. Nicholas, at Lower Tooting, erected roughly 1831. A Tiny later he obtained many important commissions in and regarding Manchester, including the Manchester and Liverpool District Bank in Spring Gardens, in 1834. About 1835, he moved to Manchester, where he began his principal proceed as an architect, St. Luke’s church, Cheetham Hill. This building, designed in a modified perpendicular style, together gone his Italian villas and supplementary structures, had a marked effect in improving the architectural taste of the district. He remained at Manchester until 1840, when he fell into debt, an occupational hazard in those days for an architect. He continued to exhibit drawings and paintings at the Royal Academy.

At some narrowing after 1840 he travelled out to India, producing paintings of subjects in Greece, India, Ethiopia, present-day Iran and India itself. Returning to London, in 1842 he went to Hamburg, then to Berlin, and lastly, in 1846, to St. Petersburg, where he lonesome architecture as a profession for the pursuits of a traveller and artist.

On the advice of Alexander von Humboldt, he turned his attention to Oriental Russia, and, having time-honored a remarkable empty passport from Nicholas I of Russia, he set out in January 1847 upon the first of many journeys throughout Siberia and Central Asia. This first journey maxim him visit the Urals, the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia and the northern Kazakh Steppes. He returned briefly to Moscow in February 1848 where he married Lucy Sherrard Finley, an Englishwoman who had been a governess in a noble Russian associates in St Petersburg. Two days superior he set off anew for Siberia, accompanied by his newly married wife. Their travels Elongated over 39,500 miles and occupied them until the decline of 1853. His declared aim in these expeditions was to sketch the scenery of Siberia, and he brought urge on over 500 smart watercolours – some of them five or six feet square – and drawings. Many were of places that were unconditionally unknown to Europeans. He kept detailed journals of his explorations, which were written in imitation of much aptitude and freshness.

On his recompense to England in 1858 he published his first book, Oriental and Western Siberia: a Narrative of Seven Years’ Explorations and Adventures in Siberia, Mongolia, the Kirghis Steppes, Chinese Tartary, and ration of Central Asia. A second volume appeared two years later: Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor and the Russian Acquisitions upon the Confines of India and China. This put it on was applauded by the Athenæum on its publication, although it was difficult suggested – after his death in 1861 – that he had used material that had since been published in Russia in a autograph album published by Richard Maak in St Petersburg in 1859. In fact, Atkinson fully time-honored his debt to Maak in the foreword to the book.

Atkinson was much in request as a speaker and in 1858 was even arranged a private audience considering Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. The similar year Atkinson gate a paper past the British Association On the Volcanoes of Central Asia. He was moreover elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and in 1859 a fellow of the Geological Society and the Ethnographic Society. He was along with elected to link of the exclusive Geographical Club. To the Proceedings of the RGS he contributed in 1859 a paper upon a Journey through some of the highest Passes in the Ala-tu and Ac-tu Mountains in Chinese Tartary, and in the Journal of the Geological Society in 1860 he wrote On some Bronze Relics found in an Auriferous Sand in Siberia.

Through Lucy’s connections to the Russian aristocracy, particularly to the Muravyev family, the Atkinsons were competent to visit many of the exiled Decembrists who had been sent to Siberia by Nicholas I. These included Mattvei Muravyev-Apostol, the Bestuchev brothers and many others. Thomas had planned to write his given book roughly the Siberian exiles, but he died, at Lower Walmer, Kent, on 13 August 1861 back it could be started.

The seven years that Thomas and Lucy Atkinson spent travelling in Siberia and Central Asia was one of the greatest travel sagas of the nineteenth century. They visited many places that had never before been visited by Europeans. During their first long journey together, for example, they travelled from Moscow to Barnaul in the Altai region, before heading south across the Kazakh Steppes to the Zhetysu or Semirechye region of Eastern Kazakhstan. It was here, in the little Cossack outpost of Kapal, that their son, Alatau Tamchiboulac Atkinson was born upon 4 November 1848. Despite creature born at the introduction of a unfriendly winter upon the steppe, he survived.

Between September 1848 following they arrived in Kopal and September the in imitation of year when they arrived put in the works to in Barnaul, Thomas and Lucy systematically visited all the river valleys of the Djungar Alatau – becoming the first Europeans ever to visit these regions. Later they made extensive journeys in eastern Siberia, Mongolia and Djungaria.

In auxiliary to Thomas’s two books, Lucy furthermore wrote a book: Recollections of Tartar Steppes, which is one of the earliest – and most entertaining – travel books ever written by a woman. Thomas’ paintings can be found in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the V I Surikov Museum in Krasnoyarsk and in the dining room at the Royal Geographical Society in London. His descriptions of activity in the Central Asia steppes are unrivalled and his paintings of the leaders of the Kazakhs at that epoch are unique.

Thomas was twice married; first to Rebecca Mercer in 1819 and the second time, in 1848, to Lucy Finley. On 13 June 1863, two years after Thomas’ death, Lucy was fixed a civil list income of £100. Thomas’ son by his first wife, John William Atkinson, who died in Hamburg upon 3 April 1846, aged 23, was a marine painter. Alatau, his son by Lucy, was educated at Rugby considering a public subscription to pay his fees. In 1869 Alatau emigrated to Hawaii, where he became editor of the Hawaiian Gazette, director of education for the islands and forward-looking organizer of the territory’s first census. He died in 1906.