Samuel Atkins remains known to art history only by his working dates, 1787 to 1808, rather than by birth or death records, a common fate for marine painters of the period whose output was valued by contemporaries chiefly for its accuracy rather than for the artist's own biography. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in most years between 1787 and 1796, working in both oil and watercolour, before spending eight years in the East Indies and along the China coast between 1796 and 1804, after which he returned to England and continued exhibiting until 1808, when all record of him ceases.
Atkins's surviving work, held today by the National Maritime Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Courtauld, among others, is generally described as quiet, truthful and low in tone, qualities well suited to the ship portraits and coastal shipping scenes that formed the bulk of his output. Several of his subjects connect to the era's great voyages of exploration, including depictions of Cook's ships Resolution and Discovery off Tahiti and of HMS Endeavour off New Holland, though these appear to be later historical or derivative treatments rather than works made from direct observation during the voyages themselves, which predate his known career.
The painting by Atkins held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, of a Royal Navy seventy-four-gun ship arriving in harbour, exemplifies the straightforward, carefully observed ship portraiture for which his limited but genuine surviving body of work remains valued by specialists in British marine painting of the Napoleonic era.