A gifted and highly respected landscapist, Samuel Colman painted views of upstate New York, New England, and the American West. Recognized for his cosmopolitan outlook and his fascination with exotic locales, Colman was also one of the first American artists to visit and paint in Spain and in North Africa.
Born in Portland, Maine, Colman grew up in New York, where his father was active as a publisher and bookseller. As a youth, he spent much of his time in the family bookstore on Broadway, a popular gathering place for artists and writers. It was there that Colman probably met the noted landscape painter, Asher B. Durand, with whom he is thought to have studied around 1850.
Colman began exhibiting his work at the annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design in New York in 1851. His paintings, which consisted of meticulously rendered views of the Hudson River Valley, Lake George, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, were well-received by his contemporaries, resulting in his election as an associate of the academy in 1854.
In 1860, Colman traveled to Europe, spending the next two years painting in France, Italy and Switzerland. He was also one of the earliest American artists to spend time in Spain and Morocco. Upon returning to New York, Colman produced numerous canvases based on his sketches of romantic sites in and around Seville and Granada.
Colman was elected to academician status at the National Academy of Design in 1862. Four years later he helped found the American Society of Painters in Water Color, serving as the organization's president for the next four years. In 1870, he made his first trip to the West, visiting California and the Rocky Mountains. Inspired by his journey, he painted a series of oils featuring wagon trains and their pioneer occupants.
Late in 1871, Colman embarked on a four-year trip abroad, visiting Italy, France, Holland, England, as well as Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco. By this time, he had abandoned the descriptive realism of the Hudson River School in favor of a broader, atmospheric style influenced by his work as a watercolorist, as well as by his familiarity with the paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner. Colman was also aware of the suggestive, Barbizon-inspired landscapes being done by the American painter, George Inness.
Returning to New York in 1875, Colman continued his involvement with New local art life. In 1877 he participated in the founding of the Society of American Artists, established to provide a more open forum for New York's progressive, European-trained artists. A year later, he joined the New York Etching Club. Towards the end of the 1870s, inspired by the American Aesthetic movement, Colman developed an extensive collection of Asian art and artifacts. He also collaborated with Louis Comfort Tiffany and with Tiffany's firm, Associated Artists, on a number of interior design projects, including the Rembrandt Room of the Henry O. Havemeyer House in New York (1890-91). Colman's taste for the exotic was also evident in the interior design scheme he developed for his home in Newport, Rhode Island, built by McKim, Mead and White during the early 1880s. His private collection also included examples of Barbizon painting and drypoints by Mary Cassatt.
An inveterate traveler, Colman made several additional trips to the West, the Canadian Rockies, Mexico, and Europe before 1906. By 1897, he had stopped sending work to public exhibitions and shortly thereafter gave up painting in order to devote his time to writing. He subsequently published two books, Nature's Harmonic Unity (1912) and Proportional Form (1920), in which he explored the relationship between art and mathematics.
Colman died in New York in 1920. Throughout his career, his work found favor with critics, one of whom wrote: “There is nothing monotonous about Mr. Colman’s style; his work is always pleasing, varied, and will be ever welcome in our exhibitions.”1 Colman is represented in major public collections throughout the United States, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Academy of Design, New York; Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
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1. Art Journal (September 1876), quoted in Clara Erskine Clement and Laurence Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works, reprint (St. Louis North Point, inc., 1969), 148.
