Samuel Colman was among the most accomplished second-generation painters of the Hudson River School (1825–1875). His professional career commenced in the early 1850s, when he began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design; he was elected an associate by mid-decade and was promoted to full membership in 1862. Born in Portland, Maine, and reared in New York City, Colman was a habitué of his father’s bookshop on Lower Broadway in Manhattan (the family publishing company was known for the high quality of its fine art prints), and this brought him into contact with some of leading artists of the day, such as Asher B. Durand, who tutored Colman briefly. In 1860 and after, Colman traveled periodically, visiting Egypt, Europe, North Africa, and the western United States, and many of his extended sojourns provided subjects for his painting. He later participated in the founding of the Society of American Artists, conceived as a progressive alternative to the increasingly conservative National Academy of Design. From 1875 to 1885 Colman visited East Hampton and, beginning in 1879, he exhibited scenes of the East Hampton area through the early 1880s. In keeping with his appreciation for the arts of foreign cultures, Colman amassed a notable collection of Asian art and artifacts, and in the 1880s he collaborated with Louis Comfort Tiffany on decorative interiors (among them the upper Fifth Avenue home of collectors Henry and Louisine Havemeyer, for which Colman designed fabric, wallpaper, and other decorative details, as well as the White House, for President Chester Arthur). During the last two decades of his life, Colman turned his attention to aesthetic theory, writing the books Nature’s Harmonic Unity (1912) and Proportional Form (1920). [Gregory Galligan] Samuel Colman was one of the first artists to visit an eastern Long Island made more accessible in the 1870s by the Long Island Railroad. The charming village of East Hampton, known for its windmills, colonial-era shingled houses, and placid ponds, was dubbed "the American Barbizon" in an 1883 issue of the popular monthly Lippincott's, which acknowledges the growing attraction of the village. "Besides the artists, a score or so of quiet families made the place their summer quarters:but its characteristic features remained the same,- in every quiet nook and coigne of vantage an artist with his easel, fair maidens trudging afield with the attendant small boy bearing easel, color box, and other impedimenta, sketching- classes setting out in great farms-wagons carpeted with straw... and pleasure-vehicles in the street." Colman grew up in New York City, where his father was a bookseller and publisher in lower Manhattan;his enterprise included the publications of engravings of artworks and brought Colman into contact with a clientele that included Asher Durand, who may in fact have tutored the young man. Colman's work was exhibited at the National Academy of Design when he was only eighteen, showing his skill in the dominant mode of the Hudson River School. By 1880, around the time he painted this picture in East Hampton, Colman had been abroad. He visited France and Spain in 1860- 1861 and spent much of the first half of the 1870s in Europe, traveling across the Mediterranean and to Egypt and Morocco. He also explored the American West and made paintings from his trips there. Colman's return to the rustic setting of Farmyard, East Hampton reaffirms the worth of cherished principles and values in the face of a rapidly changing America. The painting evokes a pre-industrial past and nostalgia for a vanishing rural scene, a sentiment that viewers of Colman's work would have easily understood. His choice to omit from the whirring activity of the barnyard scene any human presence may have alerted the viewer to the fragility of a passing way of life. The gathering storm clouds add another portentous note to the pastoral scene and enhance the somber tonality of the painting.