Edgar Alwin Payne · 1883–1947

About Edgar Payne: life, travels and legacy

Edgar Payne taught himself to paint, then spent forty years carrying an easel into some of the most remote country in the American West. His Sierra lakes, Navajo riders and Breton harbors are among the best-known images of early twentieth-century California painting.

From the Ozarks to Chicago

Edgar Alwin Payne was born on March 1, 1883, in Washburn, in Barry County in the Missouri Ozarks. A few sources, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, give 1882. He grew up in a large family; the 1900 census lists the household in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, with his father working as a carpenter and Edgar as an apprentice. Payne left home in his teens and made a living with a brush long before he had any training. He painted houses, signs, portraits and theater scenery while drifting through the Ozarks, the South and Texas, and he even reached Mexico. The Laguna Art Museum notes that by 1905 he ran a scene-painting studio in Dallas.

Around 1907 he moved to Chicago and enrolled at the School of the Art Institute. He left after a very short time (one account says two weeks), preferring to learn by painting outdoors. He joined the Palette and Chisel Club, exhibited small landscapes, and took mural commissions to pay his way. The habits of those years stayed with him: speed, a decorator's sense of large design, and a preference for working from nature rather than in a classroom.

California, Elsie and the High Sierra

Payne first came to California in 1909. He spent several months painting at Laguna Beach and then went to San Francisco, where he met the artist Elsie Palmer (1884–1971). They married in Chicago on November 9, 1912. Their daughter Evelyn was born in 1914. Elsie was a skilled painter and illustrator in her own right, and the two worked side by side for much of the next two decades. She helped with his murals and shared the long camping trips that produced his best-known work.

In about 1916 Payne made his first trip into the Sierra Nevada. The granite peaks, glacial lakes and high meadows became the subject he returned to most often for the rest of his life. A lake high in Humphreys Basin in the eastern Sierra now bears his name, Payne Lake.

The Santa Fe commission and Canyon de Chelly

In 1917 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway commissioned Payne to paint the scenery along its route through the Southwest. The railway had been trading travel and lodging for paintings since the 1890s, and its collection helped build public interest in the region. Payne spent months in northern Arizona and New Mexico, including a long stay at Canyon de Chelly in the Navajo Nation. The red canyon walls and the small groups of Navajo riders moving beneath them became his second great theme. He came back to it again and again for the next twenty years.

Around the same time he won a large mural commission for the Congress Hotel in Chicago: about 11,000 square yards of painted muslin. He rented space in Glendale, California, and hired other painters, Elsie among them, to finish it.

Laguna Beach and the art association

In 1918 the Paynes made their home and studio in Laguna Beach, then a small artists' colony on the Orange County coast. That August, Payne, Anna Hills and other local artists organized the Laguna Beach Art Association, and Payne became its first president. The association raised money to turn an old town pavilion into a gallery, and in 1929 it opened a purpose-built gallery designed by Myron Hunt. That building survives within today's Laguna Art Museum, the institution the association eventually became. In the late 1910s and early 1920s Payne also exhibited widely around Los Angeles. He later served as president of the California Art Club in 1926.

Europe: Brittany, the Alps and Chioggia

From 1922 to 1924 the family lived and painted in Europe. Payne worked in Paris and Provence, in Brittany, in Switzerland and in Italy. In the Alps he painted mountain subjects on a monumental scale, and one view of Mont Blanc is recorded as receiving an honorable mention at the Paris Salon in 1923. The fishing ports interested him just as much. Crowded harbors full of tuna boats with patched, colored sails gave him a subject made of rhythm and repetition, exactly the qualities he cared most about in a composition. He went back to paint the harbors of Brittany and Chioggia, near Venice, in 1928.

Later years and Composition of Outdoor Painting

After their return the Paynes spent much of the later 1920s on the move, wintering near New York and painting across the country in summer. The Depression cut into commissions. By the early 1930s Payne was back in Los Angeles for good, and he and Elsie separated soon after. He settled in a small Hollywood studio but kept going back to the Sierra. There he shot a color film, Sierra Journey, about traveling and painting in the mountains.

In 1941 he published Composition of Outdoor Painting, a practical study of how a landscape is organized: balance, rhythm, repetition, value and color, and a catalogue of compositional "forms." It has been reprinted many times and is still used by landscape painters today. When Payne fell ill with cancer in 1946, Elsie came back to care for him. He died in Los Angeles on April 8, 1947. Elsie went on to promote his work for years afterward, and she made the bronze relief portrait of him that is now at the Laguna Art Museum.

Where to see his work

Payne's paintings are in many public collections, among them the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Fifth Lake, about 1928), the Laguna Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Springville Museum of Art, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the Langson Orange County Museum of Art at UC Irvine, which holds several of his works. For a full scholarly treatment, see Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey (Pomegranate, 2012), the catalogue of the retrospective organized by the Crocker Art Museum.

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Sources

This biography was written for this site. Dates and facts were checked against the sources below. Where they disagree (for example, his birth year), the difference is noted above.

1. Wikipedia, "Edgar Payne." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Payne (accessed October 2026).
2. California Art Club, "Edgar Payne – 9th CAC President, May–Dec. 1926." californiaartclub.org.
3. Laguna Art Museum, artist profile "Edgar Payne" and "History" (founding of the Laguna Beach Art Association, 1918). lagunaartmuseum.org/history.
4. Smithsonian American Art Museum, "Edgar Payne" and Fifth Lake, ca. 1928 (1957.10.6). americanart.si.edu.
5. UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, "Snow in the High Sierras." langson.uci.edu.
6. Getty Research Institute, Union List of Artist Names, "Payne, Edgar Alwin." getty.edu.
7. Library of Congress Name Authority File, "Payne, Edgar A. (Edgar Alwin)," citing Janet B. Dominik, Early Artists in Laguna Beach (1986). id.loc.gov.
8. Scott A. Shields, Patricia Trenton et al., Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey (Petaluma: Pomegranate, 2012). Further reading.