While growing up in Chicago, Loring Wilkins Coleman (1918-2015) spent the summers at Tanglewood, his grandmother’s 200-acre estate overlooking the Sudbury River in Concord, Massachusetts. Artistically talented from an early age, he pursued drawing and painting while a student at Middlesex School in Concord and under the tutelage of a series of well-known artists throughout the Boston area after graduation.

In 1948 Coleman moved with his family to Sudbury, Massachusetts. Following a year devoted entirely to painting, he began his career in education at Middlesex School where he taught art for 27 years, becoming chair of the department in 1956. He also taught painting in a variety of venues including Sudbury Public Schools.

A veteran of World War II and an Army reservist, Coleman retired with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He collected firearms throughout his life and would march, musket in hand, with the Sudbury Companies of Militia and Minute to the Old North Bridge in Concord on April 19th each spring to commemorate the start of the American Revolution.

An avid outdoors man, Coleman took a keen interest in exploring the changing agrarian landscape of the Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area and capturing its fragile beauty in oil and watercolors. He spent many hours driving in search of old houses and barns recording for posterity a way of life that was rapidly vanishing. His autobiography, Loring W. Coleman Living and Painting in a Changing New England, was published in 2011.

An Academician of the National Academy of Design and a member of the American Watercolor Society, the Allied Artists of America, the Guild of Boston Artists, the New England Watercolor Society, the Concord Art Association, and the Salmagundi Club, Coleman painted his last watercolor at the age of 90 due to failing eyesight. He passed away at his home in Harvard, Massachusetts in 2015 at the age of 97.

A man of many talents and passions, Coleman is remembered best for his contributions to the world of art. In 2017, the Concord Museum received an anonymous gift of forty-seven of Coleman’s works which are on display through January 30, 2022 in the exhibition HOME: Paintings by Loring W. Coleman.