As one of the Associated Artists group led by Louis Tiffany and Candace Wheeler, Samuel Colman had a role in the major interior redecoration of the Clemens home in Hartford in 1881. He is best known, though, as a member of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York at the age of 18. He traveled extensively in Europe and the western United States, where he also set up his easel to convey landscape and architectural features in a Romantic style. Possibly his best-known work is the five-foot-by-three-foot painting Storm King on the Hudson, which shows the looming riverside mountain in the Hudson Highlands with a variety of sail and steam boats in the foreground.

Not much is known about Colman’s role in the Clemens redecoration, but Associated Artist’s next job was the Blue Room (which no longer exists) in the White House; Tiffany and Colman are listed as being in charge of color choices. The other two members of the group were Lockwood de Forest, in charge of the woodwork, and Candace Wheeler, in charge of textiles.

Colman was also the author of Nature’s Harmonic Unity: A Treatise on Its Relation to Proportional Form (1912), which drew parallels between the mathematical proportions of nature (such as the form of a seashell or flower) and those of art and architecture.