Education
Born in the King"s Heath area of Birmingham, Payne studied under Edward R. Taylor at the Birmingham School of Art, where he was one of the students commissioned to paint a series of murals under Taylor"s supervision for the redecoration of Birmingham Town Hall - the first "outward and visible sign of the rise to fame and importance of the Birmingham School". In 1900 he installed a glass kiln at the school and studied stained glass manufacture in London under Christopher Whall so that, in the Arts and Crafts tradition, design and manufacture could be taught as an integrated process.
Career
Payne was one of the Birmingham Group of Artist-Craftsmen who formed around Joseph Southall and the Birmingham School of Art in the late nineteenth century. In 1899 Payne was appointed to the School"s staff, initially as a teacher of drawing and painting, but increasingly concentrating through the 1890s on the design of stained glass. Among his outstanding students was Margaret Agnes Rope.
From at least 1904 onwards he established an independent business designing and manufacturing stained glass, producing large and notable works for churches such as East. South. Prior"s Saint Andrew’s, Roker, Street Martins, Kensal Rise, Street Mary"s, Madresfield and J. L. Pearson"s Street Alban"s, Bordesley.
In common with most of the Birmingham Group he worked across a wide variety of media, producing book illustrations for the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft and interior decoration for the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts. Painted as fresco in tempera and sitting alongside work by other figures of the Birmingham Arts and Crafts movement such as William Bidlake, Georgie Gaskin and Charles March Gere, Madresfield Court is "not only Payne"s most important scheme of decorative painting, but probably the most famous of all such Arts and Crafts schemes".
In 1908 he was commissioned to produce a wall painting for the later stages of the decoration of the Palace of Westminster. His work The Plucking of the Red and White Roses in the Temple Garden - an allegory on the Wars of the Roses - now hangs in the Palace"s East Corridor.
In Amberley, Payne continued producing work in fresco and stained glass, and in 1912 established, initially modelled in the Arts and Crafts tradition on the Bromsgrove Guild, though ultimately little more than a vehicle for his own works.
In 1909 Payne and his family moved to Amberley in Gloucestershire, one of several significant Arts and Crafts figures to move to the Cotswolds.
Membership
Payne also painted landscapes in watercolour, exhibiting at the Royal Academy from 1899 to 1935 and being elected a member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1920.
