Highly sensitive scene with meandering water at viewer's right.
This painting speaks to Colman's participation in the Hudson River School of painting.
Description | Highly sensitive scene with meandering water at viewer's right. This painting speaks to Colman's participation in the Hudson River School of painting.
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About the Artist | (1832-1920) "A significant landscape painter of the second generation of Hudson River School painters, Samuel Colman traveled widely and eventually went far beyond the Hudson River for subject matter. He created many large canvases of European, United States, Canadian, and Mexican subjects, especially scenes along the Hudson River and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He was a full member of the National Academy of Design and lived long enough to see attention to his work eclipsed by that given to modernism. He was a key person in establishing watercolor as an independent medium that was good for more than just sketching. Colman was born and raised in Portland, Maine, and early moved to New York City, where his father, a publisher and fine-art books dealer, introduced him to many of the leading artists and writers of the time. He studied with Asher B. Durand, a leader of the Hudson River School of painters, and by the time he was eighteen was exhibiting at the National Academy of Design and by age twenty-two was elected an Associate. He served as one of the founders and first president of the American Society of Watercolor Painters, founded in 1866. His watercolors were painted in a much tighter manner than his oils. Colman and Thomas Moran are considered the two most important 19th-century painters to visit Arizona where Colman did panoramic views including the Grand Canyon (1882). They were some of the few Hudson River painters that ever went West. Colman first went West in 1871 and painted in Utah and Wyoming. He also did numerous Oregon Trail depictions. One of his most noted is Ships of the Plains, 1872, now in the Union League Club in New York. In 1870, he painted Yosemite in Northern California, and in 1887-1888, visited Pasadena as a tourist. Colman manipulated light to create a glittery, silvery atmosphere causing others have called him a Luminist. Unlike his contemporary, Albert Bierstadt, he was not trying to create a sense of drama or of the grandiose. Colman's works were sensitive and suggested quiet beauty. He wrote two books on art: Nature's Harmonic Unity and Proportional Form. He was also an etcher, art collector, an authority on oriental art and porcelains, and an interior designer, working with John La Farge and Louis Tiffany." excerpted from AskArt.com |
Culture | USA |
Style | Painterly Landscape |
Medium | Oil on canvas attached to paper panel |
Sight size | 4 3/4" height X 6 3/4" width |
Frame | PH balanced window mat board, regular glass, reddish wood molding. Plexiglas back to show artist's signature on verso |
Frame size | 9" height X 11" width |
Signed | "Sam Colman" signed in graphite on verso (see last photo) |
Date of creation | Prior to 1920 |
Condition | Excellent to good, few tiny specks of loss at viewer's mid left |
Provenance | Sale of this painting benefits Halo AZ non-kill animal shelter |