[15] Her contemporary, poet and broadcaster Alister Kershaw, whose portrait she painted was runner-up in the 1944 Archibald Prize,[16][17] remembered:Back in the Thirties and early Forties there were about fifty square yards at the top of Melbourne's Little Collins Street where [...] the sight of a beard didn't provoke a display of popular indignation.

[20] Splits in the Contemporary Arts Society state branches over the control of it by the Angry Penguins versus the communist adherents started to appear publicly in 1943 but as Haese notes, in the Victorian council John Sinclair, Nolan, Perceval, Harris, Boyd, Allan Henderson and Alannah Coleman (the only woman on the committee), democratic principles prevailed; 'the Angry Penguins controlled rather than dominated the Melbourne branch because until 1945 the communist members maintained constant pressure on their leadership.

George Bell, reviewing her April 1944, widely publicised,[24] joint show with Joan Malcolm, wrote favourably of their 'dynamic style' and of Coleman's 'great variety of manners of seeing and treating her subject.'

[25] Bell listed as 'outstanding' portraits by Coleman, James Quinn, Lawson and Matthews, and landscapes by A. Keynes, G, Anderson, Isabel Tweddle in the Victorian Artists' Society Spring show of 1944.

[26] She spent a month in Sydney in November that year, working on an upcoming show, and was at Desiderious Orban's opening at Blaxland Gallery along with Douglas Watson and Charles Bush, who were then both A.I.F.

[28] At a group show at the Blue Door Gallery, Melbourne, in November 1945, Colman's still life of shasta daisies was considered by The Herald reviewer a 'choice arrangement of appealing color-tones' from 'a young painter whose progress is definite and continuous',[29] while critic Alan McCulloch considered the Daisies 'worthy of comment' amongst the 'younger artists,'[30] after having remarked that she continued 'to make progress' in a review of a Victorian Artists Society show in September that year.

[31] During the war years Coleman worked in the Navy Department, and George Bell noted a 'quiet reserve' in a portrait of a naval officer which was her contribution to the Victorian Artists' Society Autumn show of 1946.

'[35] By contrast, Charles G. Cooper, Classics Professor at the University of Queensland, in his Courier-Mail review of the 1949 joint exhibition of paintings by Alannah Coleman and Arthur Evan Read at Moreton Galleries, Queensland, is dismissive of Read's lack of subtlety, but writes glowingly of Coleman as 'distinctly an original,' praising the 'freshness, vigour and decorative excellence' of her work, and urging audiences to 'relish her piquant blend of ingenuousness and sophistication.

'[36] Artist James Wieneke of the Brisbane Telegraph is more sympathetic to Read's depictions of the slums of Sydney, and contrasts those with the 'sensitiveness and a strong feeling of romanticism' in Coleman's work, responding most favourably to the sense of humour in her Siamese Cat which has 'a quality one could definitely describe as feline.

[45] She held her first solo show, works made in Sydney, at the Myer Art Gallery in Melbourne in November 1946,[45] the event unfortunately coinciding with the death of Alannah's mother Irene.

[48] Having been welcomed to London by Charles Bush and sharing quarters in Earl's Court with Bush, his partner Phyllis Waterhouse, Joan Currie, Joan Malcolm, Douglas Watson and Peter Blayney, she set out on an adventurous, low-budget return visit with Sheila Boyle (whom she'd met on the Ranchi, for a European tour that included Lapland,[49] Germany and France, where she and Albert Tucker had chance encounter.

[1] They hitched a lift with Sydney-born English dental surgeon Denis Sharman whom Coleman soon quietly married in 1951,[50] but not before (it was rumoured)[51] she had been obliged to find employment as usherette in the Royal Box at Mills Brothers Circus, and in a Bond Street jewellery store J.W.

The couple had twins Alister and Simone in 1953, and on the babies' first birthday the family moved from their central London apartment in Birdcage Walk overlooking St James's Park,[50] and which Coleman had creatively decorated herself,[52][53] into 'Cherry Tree Cottage' in Langford Close, St. John's Wood, next door to Mark Hambourg.

Barbara Blackman remembered her as catlike (and she was, with Sunday Reed,[56] a cat lover):[57] ‘She slinks about in Royal circles, she is smelling out the buyer, she will purr up to him and whisper the right names’.

[58] She was conscientious; holding long parties to introduce artists to buyers; attending several previews in the evenings; advising clients in their own homes on the appropriate hanging of their purchases.

[63]Coleman organised an extension of the show with work by Boyd, Nolan, Blackman, Len French, Brett Whiteley and William Delafield-Cook at the Stadel’sches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-am-Main, opening on 4 July 1963.

[64] She was appointed commissioner general to the Paris Biennale for Young Painters in 1963 and was hired as director at Heal's Gallery in Tottenham Court Road, London,[2] where she showed both Australian and British artists.

Of the broader art market, Coleman commented on the high prices commanded by artists like Francis Bacon and the scarcity of works by Picasso and Jackson Pollock.

Artist and reviewer Elwyn Lynn thought it 'a most commendable survey even in a city bereft of them,' and discerned an Australian modulation, or even rejection, of French 'ease' in the way: ...Godfrey Miller romanticises Jacques Villon in a shadowed circle, Paul Haefliger’s Picassoid-Braque piece is invaded by German Expressionism; [Anthony] Underhill lacks French crispness;  Passmore gives his Cezannesque landscape a lowering, romantic sky; Fullbrook softens his cubist shapes in a fleeting landscape with a romantic mist, and even Fairweather, in his fine Gamelan...inclines to a fugitive fuzziness that is foreign to its partly French origins.

[73]The Bonython appointment lasted only a year, due to disagreements over the financial viability of the large gallery, which closed after its losses, in 1976, and the less formal openings and events that Coleman found contrary to European conventions.