Samuel Colman Watercolor Painting "View of Bruges"

Item Details

Samuel Colman (American, 1832-1920)
View of Bruges, 1883
Watercolor painting on paper
Signed and dated to the lower right

A watercolor painting on paper titled View of Bruges by listed American artist Samuel Colman (1831-1920), dated 1883. This painting features a view of the coastal city in Belgium rendered with luminous hues and expert coloring. It is signed and dated to the lower right.

A landscape painter of the second generation of the Hudson River School, Samuel Colman traveled widely and eventually went far beyond the Hudson River for his subject matter, creating many large canvases of European, United States, Canadian, and Mexican subjects. He also traveled to North Africa in the 1870s, and one of his most substantial works, (The Moorish Mosque of Sidi Halou, Tlemcen, Algeria, 1875) is in the Edna Barnes Solomon collection of the New York Public Library.

Born in Portland, Maine, Colman 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. Colman first studied with Asher B. Durand, a leader of the Hudson River School of painters, and, by the age of eighteen, was exhibiting at the National Academy of Design. At the age of twenty-two, he was elected an Associate Member. Colman became a full member of the National Academy of Design and lived and worked well into the birth of Modernism.

Colman was a key figure in the establishment of watercolor as an independent medium in its own right and, in 1886, served as a founder and first president of the American Society of Watercolor Painters.

With Thomas Moran, he is considered the most important 19th-century painter to visit Arizona where Colman undertook panoramic views, including several of the Grand Canyon (1882). They were some of the few Hudson River painters that ever went West. Colman first traveled there in 1871 and painted in Utah and Wyoming in addition to numerous depictions of the Oregon Trail. One of these notable works (Ships of the Plains, 1872) is 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 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.

Condition

- even toning.

Dimensions

Item #

18DCC771-037