As a boy, I was chiefly familiar with Norwich crapes and bombazines and Norwich shawls, which at that time were making quite a sensation in the fashionable world. It was at a later time that I came to hear of Old Crome and the Norwich school. Of him writes Mr. Wedmore, that ‘he died in a substantial square-built house, in what was a good street then, in the parish of St. George, Colegate, having begun as a workman, and ended as a bourgeois. He was a simple man, of genial company. To the end of his life he used to go of an evening to the public-house as to an informal club. In the privileged bar-parlour, behind the taps and glasses, he sat with his friends and the shopkeepers, talking of local things. But it is not to be supposed that because his life was from end to end a humble one, though prosperous even outwardly after its kind, Crome was deprived of the companionship most fitted to his genius, the stimulus that he most needed. The very existence of the Norwich Society of Artists settles that question. The local men hung on his words; he knew that he was not only making pictures, but a school. And in the quietness of a provincial city a coterie had been formed of men bent on the pursuit of an honest and homely art, and of these he was the chief.’ Dying, his last words were, ‘Hobbema, oh, Hobbema, how I loved thee!’ In my young days Mr. John Sell Cotman chiefly represented Norwich, although in later times he became connected with King’s College, London. A lady writes to me: ‘I think it was in the summer of 1842 Mr. Cotman came down to Norwich to visit his son John, who at that time was occupying a house on St. Bennet’s Road. He visited us at Thorpe several times, and was unusually well and in good spirits, with sketchbook or folio always in hand. His father and sisters, too, were then living in a small house at Thorpe, and from the balcony of their house, which looked over the valley of the Wensum, he made one of his last interesting sketches, twelve of which, after his death, the following year, were selected by his sons for publication.’