Whatever troubles there had been on the subject of Cotman’s trade or profession, they were got over by the simple process of his going his own way, and of his father’s forgiving him. The boy was educated at the grammar school, and at sixteen years old, after much discussion about his future--after the interposition of Opie, with the not very measured remark that the boy ‘had far better black shoes than be an artist’--young Cotman chose the less desirable of these unhappy alternatives, and, that he might be an artist, journeyed to London. A young man at that period, and especially a young man who was wishing to be a landscape painter, had little opportunity of artistic training, unless indeed it might be that best kind of training which consists in familiarity with people of mind, and with the works of art that bygone genius has produced, and with those natural scenes which, like the voice or the face of your friend, stimulate and enrich and endow with a new experience. Cotman in these things was happy. He was trained by the world, and by those lessons in noble by-past Art which he was so well fitted to receive. His own true taste, and the faculty of real development--which some of us call, like Wordsworth, ‘a leading from above: a something given’--made him independent of academic influence; and in his case no one undertook the academic task, and made the too-confident promise to turn into fine gold what is brass at the beginning, and must be brass to the end. Cotman was fine gold. He was, that is to say, an artist born, not manufactured. At the hospitable house of Dr. Munro, in the Adelphi Terrace, the young man fell into association with a group of painters, most of whom were his seniors. At eighteen years old he exhibited six drawings at the Royal Academy, and while he was still extremely young, he presided over a little society--a sketching club, one may call it--of which Varley and Dr. Munro were members. At very moderate prices his drawings seem to have found a sale, and he began to make excursions into remote parts of the country--into Yorkshire and Lincolnshire--besides visiting his family at Norwich. It was either at Norwich or Yarmouth, in the first years of the century, that he made the acquaintance of Dawson Turner, the antiquary. That acquaintance became a friendship, and, to use the phrase of Charles Lamb in regard to such matters, ‘a friendship that answered.’ Dawson Turner was at once, and for many a year afterwards, a help to Cotman. And as a serious student--not only a rich dilettante--he knew that he gained as much as Cotman from their association. ‘We value him greatly,’ Dawson Turner wrote to Cotman’s father, very long after their first introduction, and when it was wanted to arouse the father to an understanding of Cotman’s position, and of his depressed state.