While still a boy Samuel Colman moved to New York, where his father became a publisher and seller of books and prints. Young Colman thus grew up on familiar terms with the artists who frequented the family shop on Broadway. The aesthetic atmosphere also seems to have affected his sister, Marian, who married the painter Aaron Draper Shattuck, long a close friend of Colman.
Few facts are known about Colman's education. However, tradition has the teenager studying with Asher B. Durand around 1850. In 1851 one of his works was accepted for the first time for inclusion in an Academy annual exhibition. Years later, in 1859, when already a Associate and established as a rising young landscape painter, Colman registered for the Academy school's life class.
Colman went abroad in 1860, visiting France, Spain, and Morocco. He was struck by the Moorish landscapes in the south and by the Old Master paintings he saw in Paris and elsewhere. He retained an interest in these two subjects, as demonstrated by his continued exploitation of North African scenes and the 1870 entries in the Academy library register that show Colman checking out books by Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Returning to the United States in 1862, Colman became active in the New York art world. In 1866 he helped found the American Society of Painters in Water Color and was its first president. The following year, he experimented with etching, a medium that like watercolor, would become more interesting to him in later years. He served on the National Academy's Council from 1866 to 1868 and again in 1876-77, just prior to cofounding the rival Society of American Artists, a group composed mainly of younger, European-trained painters. He also joined the New York Etching Club at this time.
During these years, much of Colman's time was devoted to travel. His first trip to the American West may have occurred in 1870. Subsequent visits took place in the 1880s and, for long periods of time, around the turn of the century. A second, four-year trip to Europe and North Africa began in 1871. The many sketches Colman made in Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco no doubt provided models for the exotic decorative designs he produced after his return to the United States. By 1878 he was an associate of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Colman's own Newport, Rhode Island, house, designed by McKim, Mead and White in the early 1880s, served as a showcase for his ideas about interior decoration. He also developed a taste for Asian art, which, along with Barbizon School painting, he collected and displayed in his home.
Colman's other interests began leaving him little time for painting, and in 1882 he resigned from the Academy, citing his inability to exhibit (Colman to Dielman). Apparently, his resignation was not accepted. He did continue painting in later years, frequently in watercolor. After a ten-year absence from Academy annual exhibitions, his paintings were again shown in 1892, 1895, and 1896.
In 1902 he sold his large Asian collection at auction; there were more than twelve hundred lots. Throughout his career he had periodically conducted auctions of his work. Late in life he seems to have been anxious to dispose of his collection by making gifts to favorite institutions. In 1903 the Academy received a gift of books, travel photographs, and prints that included a suite of Mary Cassatt drypoints. Fourteen years later Colman gave the art museum in Portland, Maine, the city of his birth, twenty-seven of his own sketches. His last major expansion of his capacities was the writing and publishing of two books on art theory: Nature's Harmonic Unity was issued in 1912, and Proportional Form appeared just before his death.
