His commercial work was for publishers producing illustrations, calendars, greeting cards, advertisements, and book covers for the leading authors of his day, such as crime writer Agatha Christie.
[citation needed] Towards the end of World War I, on 26 July 1917, Payne married Dorothy Constance Craven at St Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square, London.
However, he still used his creative knowledge and driven personality for a variety of organisations, scouring junk shops for hidden gems of art, being a youth leader and making models for his children and grandchildren.
On one of his youth leader trips in Dorset, two boys got taken ill and had to attend the children's ward in the newly opened Lyme Regis Cottage hospital in May 1937.
[9] On 13 September 1941 in the Cheltenham Chronicle and Gloucester Graphic newspaper, Payne was quoted as saying: The success of the Air Training Corps since its formation has been phenomenal, and latest statistics prove that one in four on the entire male population of this country between the ages of 16 and 18 is a member of the corps.He retired from this position in 1942.
[14] His own career as an illustrator began to take off in the 1920s with weekly trips to London where he would approach publishers such as John Lane of The Bodleian, Sharmid, the artists' agent, the Medici society, Morland Press and ballet enthusiast Cyril Beaumont.
The watercolour and gouache poster shows a full-length clown wearing a conical hat over a black skull cap, stripey trousers and pumps with red pom-poms on.
The Victoria and Albert Museum collections object history page explains the historical significance:[17] The venture is significant as part of the growing ballet activity in England in the wake of revived interest in dance in the 1920s, which culminated in the foundation of permanent companies in Marie Rambert's Ballet Club and Ninette de Valois' Vic-Wells (now Royal) Ballet.By 1930 Payne had drawn approximately 80 book covers for The Bodley Head, The Beaumont Press, Oxford University Press, Hodder & Stoughton and Methuen Publishing.
Probably the most notable commission from this time came in 1927, when Payne was the first British artist[18] to illustrate the well-known children's story The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.
Other artists who have illustrated this book include Paul Bransom (1913), Nancy Barnhart (1922), Ernest H. Shepard (1931), Arthur Rackham (1940), Richard Cuffari (1966), Tasha Tudor (1966), Michael Hague (1980), James Lynch (1995) Scott McKowen (2005), and Robert Ingpen (2007).
[20] However, children's author Selma G. Lanes wrote that even though Payne's twenty animated drawings have almost nothing in common with the "stateliness of Grahame's prose" they are the most ambitious to date" and a full of "lively improvisations".