This is an artwork by James Stark (1794-1859) which is in the collections of Norwich Castle Museum. It was purchased for the museum in 1975 with grants from the Art Fund, Watney Mann (I don’t specifically know why the brewery contributed to this) and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Stark was a Norwich School landscape painter, best known for his big and usually windswept skies along with his slightly melancholy countryside scenes. He trained in Norwich, showed at the Royal Academy, and later taught drawing, including a spell as a master at Queen’s College, Cambridge.
In terms of this rather serene artwork, in the bottom-left of his painting there are some fishermen going about their business in what would have been a very different town. With no bus or train services at this point, this would have likely felt a rather remote destination.
Stark painted this in the mid-1830s, at a time when Cromer was starting to evolve as something of a summer tourist destination for those in Norwich and environs. The railways didn’t arrive here until the 1870s, so the town would remain relatively unchanged for some decades.
Of course, I feel the need for AI to join the party and this is what it believes the scene would look like today if painted in a similar style. I rather like this. The addition of Cromer pier, constructed in 1901, is an accurate one even if some other elements aren’t exactly perfect here.