Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/118

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

V. Green, J. R. Smith, W. Ward, R. Pollard, and others, and are valuable, because truthful records of child-life in Paye's day. Paye was greatly helped in early life by the Rev. Joseph Holden Potts, vicar of Kensington and archdeacon of Middlesex, who purchased many of his works. Subsequently he was patronised by Dr. John Wolcot (Peter Pindar) [q. v.], who did much to promote Paye's success as a painter, until a breach took place between them. When left to his own resources Paye quickly sank into poverty and neglect, and was eventually crippled by illness, though he continued painting after losing the use of his right arm. He received assistance from the artists' benevolent fund, but died quite forgotten and neglected in December 1821. At the exhibition of A Century of British Art (Grosvenor Gallery, 1888–9) a picture was lent by Sir John Neeld, bart., representing a candle-light scene (a style in which Paye especially excelled), with a portrait of the artist engraving a portrait. A picture by Paye of an interior, with an old woman at work, was once sold as a fine Netherlandish work, and another picture, ‘The Widow's Cruse,’ was not only sold, but even exhibited in a well-known picture-dealer's shop as the work of Velasquez. A portrait of Paye, engraved from a drawing by himself, accompanies a memoir of him in Arnold's ‘Library of the Fine Arts.’ Paye appears to have had a son (C. W. Paye) and a daughter, who both painted miniatures, and were exhibitors at the Royal Academy from 1798 to 1808.

[Arnold's Library of the Fine Arts, iii. 95; Redgrave's Dict. of Artists; Catalogues of the Royal Academy, Society of Artists, &c.]

L. C.

PAYNE. [See also Pain and Paine.]

PAYNE, GEORGE (1781–1848), congregational divine, born at Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, on 17 Sept. 1781, was youngest son of Alexander Payne, a cooper, by his wife, Mary Dyer of Bampton. The father, who was a churchman, in early life turned baptist after hearing the sermons of Law Butterworth of Bingworth, and in 1783 became the baptist preacher to the church of Walgrave, Northamptonshire. Two years later (June 1785) he baptised his own wife, and received ordination on 6 July. Along with Fuller and Carey he was a founder of the Baptist Missionary Society. Alexander Payne died on 13 Feb. 1819, aged 77, and after a pastorate at Walgrave of thirty-three years. His wife died on 5 Jan. 1814, aged 71. There is a tablet to their memory in Walgrave church.

George went to school at Walgrave, and subsequently at the Northampton academy. He entered Hoxton academy to study for the congregationalist ministry in 1802, and on 13 April 1804 he was elected, with Joseph Fletcher, Glasgow scholar on the Dr. Williams trust. The two proceeded to Glasgow University together (Memoirs of Thomas Wilson, Esq., pp. 275, 276, 279; Memoirs of Joseph Fletcher, p. 47). Payne graduated M.A. in the spring of 1807, and returned home, marrying, on 30 Oct. 1807, a daughter of Alexander Gibbs, a corn factor, and member of the Scottish church, Hoxton. For a year he acted as assistant minister to Edward Parsons of Leeds. On 28 Aug. 1808 he accepted an invitation to become George Lambert's permanent coadjutor at Hull. Terminating his engagement at Hull on 14 June 1812, Payne was ordained at Edinburgh on the following 2 July, and entered on his pastorate of a congregation of seceders who had divided from James Alexander Haldane [q. v.] in March 1808 on the latter's renouncing infant baptism. This body met in Bernard's rooms, Thistle Street, Edinburgh. A new chapel was built for Payne in Albany Street, and opened 2 May 1817, and here he laboured till 1823. While in Edinburgh he contributed to congregationalist literature, and assisted in the foundation of the Edinburgh Itinerant Society and the Congregational Union of Scotland.

In April 1823 he left Scotland to become theological tutor of the Blackburn academy, the precursor of the present Lancashire Independent College. For the first two or three years of his residence in Blackburn Payne also acted as pastor to a congregational church which met in Mount Street (Evang. Mag. 1823). On 18 Nov. 1828 he received the degree of honorary LL.D. from the university of Glasgow on the occasion of the publication of his ‘Elements of Mental and Moral Science.’

Payne left Blackburn to become theological tutor to the western academy on its removal from Axminster to Exeter 1 July 1829. In 1836 he was chosen chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. In 1844 he preached the eleventh series of the congregational lectures initiated by the committee of the congregational library in Bloomfield Street, Finsbury. His course of eight lectures was published in the following year under the title ‘On the Doctrine of Original Sin.’

In January 1846 the western college was removed from Exeter to a site between Devonport and Plymouth. In April 1848