LONDON, ENGLAND.- The British Museum presents "The Poetry of Nature: Watercolours by John Sell Cotman 1782-184", on view through may 19, 2002. John Sell Cotman's Greta Bridge has been called one of the greatest creations of the Romantic movement and the most perfect image in the entire history of English watercolour painting. It forms the centrepiece of this exhibition of Cotman's work, the first devoted to the artist for twenty years. Greta Bridge is based on drawings Cotman made in North Yorkshire in the late summer of 1805. The Museum is particularly rich in watercolours and drawings from this crucial phase of Cotman's career, and the exhibition includes other studies of the river, and the surrounding woodland. Some of his time was spent at nearby Rokeby Park, soon to be immortalised by Walter Scott, who described its surroundings as 'wild and romantic' in the introduction to his poem of 1813. Cotman's excursion to Durham Cathedral is represented in the exhibition by two further watercolours, which show the artist applying his clear, analytical method to architectural subjects. During his middle years, Cotman lived in relative isolation in Norwich and Yarmouth. Works such as The dismasted brig and Mousehold Heath show his completely original sensitivity to varying qualities of colour and space both on the coast and inland. Cotman's two volumes of prints of Normandy architecture, on which he worked from 1817 until 1822, reveal his genius for discovering the underlying structure of a view or a building. After so much exacting linear draughtsmanship, his final period is characterised by brilliant colour, and a much more expressive use of paint. These paintings and drawings are freer, concerned to capture the elemental power of wind and weather. A series of drawings made on a final trip to Norfolk in the autumn of 1841, when he found much of the familiar landscape transformed by floods, provides a moving conclusion to his lifelong meditation on the place of man in nature. As a complement to the 40 works by Cotman, the exhibition includes watercolours and drawings by inspirational figures such as Girtin and Gainsborough, and contemporaries Peter Dewint and John Crome, which cast light on the development of Cotman's own art. The exhibition also marks the centenary of the acquisition of the collection of James Reeve, the Norwich curator and collector who in 1902 sold Greta Bridge to the British Museum with well over one thousand works by artists of the Norwich School.