THE Bowes Museum is to mount at exhibition of watercolours by John Sell Cotman who, though generally thought of as belonging to the Norwich School of painters, spent a considerable amount of time in Durham and North Yorkshire.

In his early twenties, he made three visits to the North - in 1803, 1804 and 1805. His patrons were the Cholmeley family of Brandsby, near York. He became their drawing master, and in 1805 travelled with the son, Francis, to visit the Morritt family at Rokeby near Barnard Castle.

The watercolours he made of the rivers Greta and Tees are collectively admired as The Greta Series, and several will be included in the exhibition.

Cotman was born in Norwich in 1782, the son of a shopkeeper who turned from hairdressing to haberdashery. He had little formal training, but became a leading member of the circle of watercolour artists who gathered around Thomas Girtin in London around the turn of the nineteenth century. He later returned to his native Norwich.

He worked at a wide variety of locations in the North. Often travelling with his Brandsby patrons and pupils, he visited Fountains, Rievaulx, Byland and Kirkstall and sketched in the grounds of Castle Howard and Duncombe Park.

The Bowes exhibition will provide the first full-length study of his work in the North which was the most formative, ambitious and optimistic period of his career.

Letters between Francis Cholmeley and his mother and sisters have been studied for the first time in detail and these, with the exhibition and an accompanying book, will provide a record of the family's artistic, literary, philosophical, historical, scientific and political interests and connections, putting Cotman's work into context.

Despite his lack of success in London and mounting debt, Cotman persevered, and his northern experience continued to inform his work for the rest of his career. His style at the time was considered to be too unfinished, and was not fully appreciated until many decades later.

The absolute accolade had to wait until the twentieth century when, in the Thirties, Laurence Binyon, the First World War poet and keeper of print and drawings at the British Museum, is quoted as saying, with regard to Cotman's visits to Yorkshire between 1803 and 1805, that these saw the "making of the most extraordinary beautiful watercolours ever painted."

John Sell Cotman: Watercolours in Durham and Yorkshire, opens on May 7 and runs until July 31.