Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar Payne

The go-to how-to bible for representational landscape artists

Landscape painter Edgar Alwin Payne (1883-1947) was born in the Ozarks of Missouri, but he achieved renown as one of the California Impressionists, a loosely associated group of artists that included William Wendt and Granville Redmond. In 1941, Payne published the book Composition of Outdoor Painting, in which he helps artists develop fundamental skills of picture construction and imparts his personal philosophy of making art from nature. This book is truly a valuable asset for any artist engaging in representational depictions of landscape, regardless of medium.

The primary purpose of this book is to teach the artist how to take the wealth of visual detail one encounters when viewing the natural world and distill it down to a visual arrangement worthy of being called art. To this end, Payne has outlined a loose but comprehensive system of compositional structures that can be employed as formal scaffolding for the creation of landscape art. He does so in a way that is suggestive and encouraging without being dogmatic. As a fan and amateur practitioner of realist art, impressionism included, I agree with everything Payne has to say in this book. That doesn’t mean he always says it well. Though he makes his points articulately, his writing is often as dry and repetitive as a software instruction manual. However, though the prose couldn’t be called lively, each intelligently rendered sentence reads like an eternal verity of artistic practice.

More valuable than the text, however, are Payne’s illustrations, in which he elegantly illustrates his method of compositional sketching. In these drawings he presents examples of each compositional template, suggests multiple treatments of the same natural vista, and simplifies other landscape artists’ works down to their barest schematics. By providing myriad variations on Payne’s recommended compositional strategies, these thumbnail sketches deliver an ample education on how to imbue balance, rhythm, and visual interest into one’s drawings and paintings. Payne doesn’t tell you how to paint a tree or shade a mountain. For that type of brushstroke-level advice, I would suggest Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting. What makes Composition of Outdoor Painting different from so many other painting manuals is that probably at least 90 percent of the content concerns the artist’s thought process before he or she ever touches brush to canvas.

More recent editions of the book include a section of color illustrations and an addenda by Payne’s daughter, Evelyn Payne Hatcher, herself an artist. Though brief, this afterword does add some valuable content to the discussion as she reveals more of her father’s, as well as her mother’s, artistic processes. This section includes instructional color studies by Edgar Payne as well as helpful color reproductions of his landscape paintings of different styles, subjects, and states of completion.

For the past thirty-odd years, Composition of Outdoor Painting has been self-published by Payne’s daughter. It used to be you could only get this book by mail order from one art gallery in California, but nowadays anyone can easily buy a copy online, which hopefully will mean more widespread knowledge and implementation of this useful resource.

Sierra Divide, painting by Edgar Payne

Illustrations from Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar Payne

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