Born at King’s Heath, Birmingham, Henry Albert Payne studied at the Birmingham
School of Art under E R Taylor. He was among the students who painted
murals in the Town Hall (his panel exhibited 1890), and joined the
staff in 1889.

His main interest was in stained glass. Having taught
the subject in the 1890, he himself underwent a course of instruction
from Christopher WhaII in 1901, and by 1904, though still teaching, he was running a busy independent stained-glass prac¬tice.

Meanwhile he
was involved in a number of decorative schemes with the Bromsgrove
Guild, and in 1902 was commissioned to decorate the chapel at
Madresfield Court, a task which occupied him for twenty years and is
one of the great achievements of the Arts and Crafts movement. It also
led to his painting a mural in the Palace of Westminster.

In 1901 Henry Payne had married Edith Gere, sister of Charles and Margaret and herself a
talented artist, and in 1909 they settled at St Loe’s House, Amberley,
in Gloucestershire, thus consolidating the colonisation of the
Cotswolds by Birmingham artists begun when the Geres had moved to
Painswick a few years earlier.

Payne continued to pro¬duce stained glass
and founded the `St Loe’s Guild’, while also painting portraits and
landscapes.

He exhibited at the RA (1899- 1935), with the Arts and
Crafts Exhibition Society, and elsewhere, and was a member of the
Society of Painters in Tempera.

Henry Payne died at Amberley 4 July 1940.

With thanks to artbiogs.co.uk