Edgar Payne, one of the most accomplished California landscape painters in the early 20th century, seems to have been destined to become an artist.

As a youngster he made his own paint out of pokeberry juice and bluing, much to the dismay of his father, who wanted him to follow in his footsteps as a carpenter.

As a young man, he postponed the time of his wedding because "the light was good," which meant it was time to paint.

As an established artist, he traveled the world in a Model T Ford looking for scenic sites along the Southern and Central California coast, the Sierra, the Swiss Alps, the harbors and waterways of France and Italy, and the desert Southwest.

A 1917 Model T is the centerpiece of an exhibition of Payne's paintings, drawings, photographs, and objects from his studio at the Crocker Art Museum now through May 6. Organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the show makes its debut at the Crocker before traveling to the Pasadena Museum and the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Okla.

The exhibition's curator, Scott Shields, has arranged the display both chronologically and thematically because Payne tended to take up a subject, exhaust it and move to new challenges. In many ways he was a forerunner of Sacramento's own Gregory Kondos, who has painted the Sacramento River, Napa Valley, the Southwest, Greece and France.

Born in Missouri in 1883, Payne lived in Arkansas, Texas and Illinois, where he attended the Chicago Art Institute for two weeks before leaving to study painting on his own. He began his art career by painting signs, stage sets and murals. He first came to California in 1909 and showed his California scenes primarily in Chicago. Eventually he settled in Southern California, married his wife, Elsie, (also a painter) and traveled widely by car looking for "unspeakably sublime" landscapes.

"In each locale," said Shields, "he sought vitality, bigness, nobility and grandeur, which he turned into unified, carefully calculated compositions with brushwork that seemed to pulsate with life."

Though Payne used Impressionistic color and brushwork, Shields pointed out that his subjects were more like those of the Hudson River School than the quieter subjects that most California artists at the time favored. Indeed, his painting "Sycamore in Autumn, Orange County Park" done around 1917, features a giant of a tree, whose twisted trunk dominates the composition under a canopy of golden leaves. Less dramatic is a scene of eucalyptus trees that fits more easily into the sensibility of most California artists of the time.

He soon moves to scenes of the California coast with crashing waves and rocky shorelines, a theme Shields believes is a response to the unsettled conditions of World War I. He wasn't averse to romanticizing his subjects, as is apparent in a rip-snorter of a painting of Santa Cruz Island, with a vortexlike rock formation and tiny, piratelike figures on the beach in front.

Payne hit his stride with renditions of the peaks of the Southern California Sierra, filling one scene after another with towering mountains. Using a limited palette, he gets an amazing degree of luminosity out of his somewhat formulaic compositions. Paintings such as "Solitude's Enchantments," 1921, are radiant and alive with color.

Unsurprisingly, he finds an affinity as well with Alpine scenes, among them paintings of Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and the Jungfrau. Here, he loosens up and adopts an almost divisionist or pointillist application of brushwork and rawer, more vibrant color. Two of these paintings, "Les Haut Sierra" and "Le Grand Pic Blanc," were shown at the Paris salon while he was in France and showed the contrast between his images of Swiss peaks and California mountains. Apparently the French preferred his Alpine scene to the California one, awarding it a prize.

From the Alps, Payne traveled to France and Italy, where he focused on colorful paintings of fishing boats in harbors. These vibrant images with their underlying geometry are among the most modernistic of Payne's works. "Breton Tuna Boats, Concarneau, France," 1924, is a tour de force of bravura painting.

Payne first traveled to the Southwest in 1916 at the invitation of the Santa Fe Railroad, doing an imposing painting of small figures on horseback at the base of a sheer cliff at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. He returned to the area in the 1930s, painting many more images of the desert rock formations in a lighter, more buoyant palette.

While he usually painted small figures to emphasize the scale of the landscape, he occasionally presented large figures, including a sentimental scene of Navajo Indians on horseback at sunset that makes one think of "The End of the Trail."

By the 1940s, Payne had become increasingly negative about modernism, having founded The Society for Sanity in Art in 1939. At the same time, his work began to fall into disfavor with the rise of Abstract Expressionism. Ironically, he was born just a couple of years after Pablo Picasso and died in 1947 as Jackson Pollock was achieving his ascendancy.

During the 1950s and 1960s, his work was almost forgotten, but a return to representation in the 1970s brought a renewed appreciation of his work. The exhibition at the Crocker is the largest assemblage of his works ever, and it is accompanied by a liberally illustrated full color catalog with essays by Shields and other art historians. It makes a substantial contribution to our knowledge of early 20th century California painting.

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