In November 1805 we find Cotman established in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, writing to Dawson Turner that he had been in Yorkshire and Durham all the autumn, ‘making many close copies of the fickle Dame Nature--copies,’ writes Cotman, not very elegantly, ‘consequently valuable on that account.’ A hope of settling in Norwich--of working, and founding a drawing-class there--was now growing upon him, and in 1806 it was accomplished. A young bachelor of four-and-twenty--personally a little extravagant, but taking his art very seriously--he possessed himself of an excellent house in Luckett’s Court, Wymer Street. I saw the house this summer. A dignified house, with gables of the Seventeenth Century, and much of the interior woodwork seemingly of the early Eighteenth. For six years Cotman lived there. There, was wrought almost all the best of his earlier art: Mr. J. J. Colman’s ‘St. Luke’s Chapel’; Mr. Reeve’s ‘Twickenham’ (from a yet earlier sketch); the same collector’s ‘Mousehold Heath’; my own ewe lamb, ‘Bishopgate Bridge’; and a mass of work besides--much of which, unquestionably, has been mislaid, neglected, ruined, forgotten. The exhibition held at Norwich--to which I began by referring--gave us an excellent opportunity of really studying this rarer and earlier art. I am not thinking of the insignificant fact that there was to be seen there a puerile yet rather clever performance which dates from Cotman’s twelfth year; but to the assemblage of work of the early time when he was really an artist--from 1800, say, to 1812. What was the character of his labour then? With whom did he sympathise? Whom did he at all resemble? The influence of Turner and of Girtin is to be detected in some of the work of this period--in the noble architectural work, especially--and it is not in the slightest degree unlikely that, in his turn, Cotman exercised some influence over Turner; at a much later time I mean, when everyday sobriety sufficed for neither of them, and when Cotman, surely quite as much as Turner, led the way to revelries of colour. Between Cotman and Girtin there could be no such reciprocity of influence, for Girtin died, an accomplished master of water-colour, though less than thirty years old, in 1802, and Cotman was then but twenty.