In the course of his painting expeditions, Edgar Alwin Payne’s artistic journey covered some 100,000 miles throughout the United States and Europe.1 Payne (1883–1947) found magnificence in diverse settings, including the Southern and central California coast, the Sierra Nevada, the Swiss Alps, the harbors and waterways of France and Italy, and the desert Southwest (Fig. 1). In each locale, he sought vitality, bigness, nobility, and grandeur, which he turned into unified, carefully calculated compositions with brushwork that seemed to pulsate with life.
