The Norwich School of painters

The Norwich School of painters, founded in 1803 in Norwich, was the first provincial art movement in Britain. Artists of this school were inspired by the natural beauty of the Norfolk landscape and owed some influence to the work of landscape painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

The Norwich School's great achievement was that a small group of self-taught working class artists were able to paint with vitality the hinterland surrounding Norwich, assisted by meagre local patronage. Far from creating pastiches of Dutch seventeenth century work, Crome and Cotman, along with Joseph Stannard, established a school of landscape painting which deserves far greater fame; the broad washes of Cotman's water-colours anticipate French impressionism.

 Principal artists of the Norwich School include the self-taught John Crome, John Sell Cotman and Joseph Stannard.

Norwich School Painters were particularly fond of Thorpe and there are many of their works featuring the river as it runs through what was then a very picturesque village. Some of them drew and painted Postwick Grove dozens of times.

The reason the Norwich School are not as well known as other painters of the period, notably Constable and Turner, is primarily because the majority of their canvases were collected by the industrialist J. J. Colman (of Colman's mustard fame), and thereafter have been on permanent display in Norwich Castle Museum since the 1880's. This lack of exposure was remedied in 2001, when many of the major works by the Norwich School were exhibited for the first time outside of Norwich at the Tate Gallery, London.