One of Cleveland’s most popular painters of the early 20th century, Ora Coltman worked in a representational style that featured broad areas of bright color. Born in Shelby, Ohio, he came to Cleveland in the early 1880s to study law but soon abandoned the field for a career in art. He subsequently secured a job as a designer at the Joseph Carabelli Monument Works, a local marble carving firm. In the mid-1880s he traveled to Europe and studied painting at the Académie Julian in Paris and at a private studio in Munich. On returning to America, he studied with William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in New York. Coltman returned to Cleveland and had his first solo exhibition in 1902 at the Case Library, showing watercolors painted in France and England. He continued to exhibit watercolors throughout the next decade but in the early 1920s worked more frequently in oil. In the 1920s and 1930s he exhibited in May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the annuals of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. During this time he also exhibited at Cleveland’s Gage Gallery, Women’s City Club, and Lindner’s Little Gallery. After 1918 he began spending his summers painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he became an active member of the local art colony. In 1933, under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project, he painted a large triptych titled Dominance of the City for the Cleveland Public Library. During the last years of his life, Coltman continued to paint despite being bedridden from illness.
"Transformations in Cleveland Art" (CMA, 1996), p. 226