The beginning of the later period of Cotman’s art dates rather from the days of his visits to Normandy than from those of his removal to King’s College. I used to think that it was a good deal by the composition--by the theme chosen and by the disposition of its different elements--that we could best affix some approximate date to the undated work of this delightful master. And, unquestionably, composition counts; and the tendency as time advanced was towards a greater elegance in this matter--a more elaborate art, a franker departure from that Nature which suffers, in Boucher’s word, the grass to be ‘too green,’ which ‘lacks,’ in Lancret’s answer, ‘harmony and seductiveness.’ But, with a pretty familiar knowledge, now, of at least a couple of hundred of Cotman’s sketches and designs--the most accomplished of his work, with its wise and learned or inspired omissions, is sometimes disparaged as a ‘sketch’--I am inclined to extend the period during which Cotman’s art was wont to be wrought into studied fineness of line, and I would appeal, perhaps, chiefly to colour to settle the question as to the date of this or that drawing, coming from the hand of one who was a poet at the beginning and a poet at the end. Undoubtedly, in the best--in the very best--of Cotman’s later work (in Mr. Pyke Thompson’s ‘Blue Afternoon,’ for instance, and Mr. Bulwer’s ‘Blasting St. Vincent’s Rock’), there is a greater freedom of poetic expression than was reached in the earlier work; an even keener sensibility, an added love of luxury of hue and of forms that have grandeur sometimes in their restraint, or elegance in their abandonment. Certain black-and-white studies done in the last autumn of Cotman’s life--one October and November, when the country around Norwich lay under flood, and Cotman, visiting his native city, went out to depict no definite landscape, but ‘the world afloat’--display that faculty of seizing the spirit of a thing more than its body, which Youth, in any art, can hardly claim--which comes to men, it may be, with the refinement and chastening of the years. But the germs of all this faculty were there from the first. Cotman was indebted for them to no institution, and to no outward training. The Heavens had so willed it that his delightful labour--so sterling, so sober, so poetic--should evade popularity. He was granted his sensibilities that it should be impossible to vulgarise him. Through good report and evil report he was an artist only. And so he accomplished his work. (_Magazine of Art_, December 1888.) H. G. HINE