Born in Cobh of English parents, George Mounsey Wheatley Atkinson spent some years at sea as a ship's carpenter before settling in his native town, where he became Inspector of Shipping and Emigrants. He lived at 3 Mervue Terrace, with a family of three sons and one daughter, all of whom later became painters. Atkinson was self-taught, taking up painting in his mid-thirties. He first appears at the inaugural Cork Art Union exhibition in 1841, where he showed five works, all representing "..different views of our noble harbour of Cove, in storm, in calm, in haze, and in sunshine: together with brigs, schooners, cutters, and steamers in every position and circumstance".

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited Cork in 1849. To mark the event, Atkinson mounted an exhibition of his paintings in a pavilion in Cobh. The Royal Squadron arrived as night was falling, and the harbour was illuminated by fireworks and bonfires, as well as by blue lights strung along the yardarms of the ships. Atkinson was to paint this scene in a work entitled The Arrival of the Royal Squadron, which was sold by lottery in 1850 at Fletcher's Gallery. The royal visit was recorded by Atkinson in several paintings.

The key industries in Cork during this period brewing, provisioning, flour-milling and ship-building were based on the rich agricultural hinterland of Cork and on the strategically important harbour, which was Ireland's main Atlantic port. Whether used for merchant shipping, assembling fleets of convict ships for Australia, or warships for the American and Peninsular Wars, the harbour's size and security made it one of the busiest ports in the world. As a result, Cork's wealth was based more on commerce than on manufacturing, the city council and corporate life being dominated by a merchant class which also controlled cultural and social life. The Atlantic trade was not only in goods. Over the years, tens of thousands of people embarked at Cork harbour for the New World. This painting of a boating party landing on Haulbowline Island shows a different aspect of the harbour a scene of social life among the privileged classes whose elegant villas and wooded demesnes ringed the harbour.

In his acute observation of weather conditions and in the accurate rendering of ships and their rigging, Atkinson may be compared with the American luminist painters Francis Silva and Fitz Hugh Lane. There are a number of works by Atkinson in the Crawford Gallery. He is also represented in the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut and in the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.