JOHN CROME, MOUSEHOLD HEATH
The Norwich School of Painting was a regional arts movement of major importance in the nineteenth century and is strongly represented in the collections of the Norwich Castle Museum. 
John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) and John Crome (1768-1821) were the greatest names in the group.
The Norwich Society of Artists was founded in 1801, and Crome was its President in 1808 and 1821.  He exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution in London, and toured in France and Belgium in 1814.  His work however was nearly all of Norfolk landscapes.  Whilst painting mainly in oils, he also produced some fine watercolours, and his etchings were published in 1834, some years after his death. He had a son who was also a landscape painter John Berny Crome ‘Young Crome’  (1794-1842).

Mousehold Heath, the subject of this painting, is an open area rising on the north east of the City of Norwich. Reduced in size by the enclosures of the early nineteenth century it is now bounded by the inner ring road. The Heath earlier stretched towards South Walsham and Ranworth.  Mousehold Heath was passed to the City of Norwich by the Anglican Church, in 1880, as a place of recreation for ever. There is also an etching of Mousehold Heath by Crome (c1810) and Cotman too painted the heathscape.