At the same year he was invited to become the first Scottish member of the New English Art Club and was joined by several of his friends, notably John Lavery, Thomas Millie Dow of the Glasgow Boys and Norman Garstin.

Influenced by the Hague school and by Jules Bastien-Lepage, his picture A Bead Stringer, Venice gained an honourable mention at the Salon in 1885.

Mann travelled extensively in Britain, paying several visits to the coast in Angus and Fife, and to Walberswick, Suffolk.

In 1895 Mann's work was exhibited in London at the Barbican and in Dublin at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art.

But he preferred to "live away from the haunts of other artists" because the relative prosperity which he owed to his family made it unnecessary to pay much attention to exhibition institutions, patrons and dealers.

Mann was also greatly attracted by the stillness of the deserted slow-moving waterways of rural England; the Alde and the Dorset Avon, beloved by many Scottish artists of the period.