Genre Painting (Animals, Boats, Trees)

Coleman was curious, thoughtful, thorough and appreciative. He kept a diary (in a fine hand) from an early age as he grew up as a son of the manse. Early in his life, he learned to draw and paint, and his eye was trained to observe shrewdly. His earliest work, as with many artists, is his strongest and clearest, and he might well have become an artist if geology had not won out as his profession. As he trekked around the world studying mountain and glacier systems, however, the artist in him tagged along. His paintings only sometimes depicted geological formations. Most often his eye was taken with a stirring view or a humble domestic scene: a simple cottage, livestock, a bank of flowers. His tiny drawings were even more intimate and poetic --little vignettes of a dog in harness, a woman at a pump, a pair of boots à la Van Gogh, a knife and its sheath, a saddle, a harbour at evening, a steamer against the sunset, and so on. In these the detail is nice and sharp and accurate, and done with a deftness that is remarkable.