Perhaps best known as watercolourist, Freeman was a pupil of John Sell Cotman, carrying on the tradition of the Norwich School together with Miles Edmund and John Joseph Cotman, Henry Bright and others. He lived in Norwich and exhibited once at the Royal Academy (1860) and once at Suffolk Street (1862). Examples of his work are in the Castle Museum, Norwich, and he is discussed in Derek Clifford, Watercolours of the Norwich School, 1965, pp. 73, 75.