A member of the Birmingham Group of artist-craftsmen led by Joseph Southall, Payne worked in a variety of media but his best-known achievements are in the field of mural painting and stained-glass production.
Between 1902-23 he worked on the wall paintings of the chapel at Madresfield Court near Malvern while in 1904 he established an business designing and making stained glass.
But he was also a watercolourist, exhibiting at the Royal Academy from 1899-1935, and elected a member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1920.
A private collection of watercolours by the Birmingham-born painter will be offered for sale on October 18 at Mallams in Oxford. The 14 works span much of Payne’s oeuvre; from Pre-Raphaelite-style Biblical genre scenes to a series of Cotswolds landscapes including two views of The Quarry at Culver Hill in the village of Amberley, where Payne lived from 1909.
Pictured here is Valley of Humiliation, a 15 x 22in (39 x 56cm) pastoral landscape estimated at £1000-1500 and previously sold by The Fine Art Society in London.
The work takes its title from a moment in the second book of John Bunyan’s 1678 Christian allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the subject Christiana happens upon a child singing in “a place where men have met with angels and found the words of life”.
