His father opened a bookstore, attracting a literate clientele that may have influenced Colman's artistic development.

He is believed to have studied briefly under the Hudson River School painter Asher Durand, and he exhibited his first work at the National Academy of Design in 1850.

His landscape paintings in the 1850s and 1860s were influenced by the Hudson River School, an example being Meadows and Wildflowers at Conway (1856) now in the collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.

In the 1860s, Colman lived in Irvington, New York, where he made a number of paintings featuring the countryside around the village.

He made his first trip abroad to France and Spain in 1860–1861, and returned for a more extensive four-year European tour in the early 1870s in which he spent much time in Mediterranean locales.