Charlotte Buell Coman
1833-1924
“A Farmer’s Cottage Picardy, France”, oil, (date unknown), A.C. Hoyt Memorial Fund Purchase
Coman was nearly forty and almost totally deaf when she began painting professionally, studying first in NYC and then Europe. While in Europe she was influenced by the work of Corot and Daubigny and began sending Barbizon-style landscapes back to America for exhibition, winning acclaim at the Phila. Centennial. On her return to the U.S. in the early 1880s, she established a studio in NYC and her landscapes took on the misty, poetic quality of Tonalism. Beginning in 1887, her landscapes were produced in the Adirondacks (summers), New Jersey, and St. Augustine, FL where she had a studio for several years in the same building as Martin Johnson Heade. Coman continued to paint into old age, and was hailed at her death as one of the major American women landscape painters.