In May 1776, he left Reynolds' studio, and about two years later, having made some money by portrait painting back in Devon, he went to study in Italy.

On his return to England, three years later, he revisited his native county, then settled in London, where John Opie and Henry Fuseli were his rivals.

[1] His enormous Death of Wat Tyler was exhibited in 1787;[1] commissioned by a London alderman, it hung in the Guildhall until its destruction during the Second World War.

[2] Shortly afterwards Northcote began a set of ten subjects, entitled "The Modest Girl and the Wanton", which were completed and engraved in 1796.

[5] In the production of his Life of Titian, his last work, which appeared in 1830, he was assisted by William Hazlitt, who previously, in 1826, had given to the public in the New Monthly Magazine his recollections of Northcote's pungent and cynical "conversations", causing some problems for the painter and his friends.