My wife is a sometime painter. She's done a striking reinterpretation of a Georgia O'Keeffe flower, several flowers she photographed herself, and even a portrait of me (that never gets older). She works long and patiently on each canvas. Around 2002, maybe, we walked by a gallery, and she pointed and said, "Those are by Thomas Kinkade." "Who?" "The Painter of Light." "Oh." As I recall, they were very bright paintings of yellow flowers with sunlight streaming across them—helped by a few downlights. "So ... is it that all his paintings are brightly lit?" "Yeah, pretty much." They were good paintings—I've seen a lot worse in gallery windows—but I wondered about the pretentious nickname.

Kinkade was also known for his idyllic landscapes. Someone told me that there was some controversy because Kinkade didn't actually paint all the paintings he sold as "Kinkades." I love poster art—Mucha's Cigarette Paper Women, the Normandie, Klimt's Kiss, etc.—so reproductions don't bother me, but the Painter of Light seemed to be doing something else altogether:

THOMAS KINKADE's 100,000-square-foot headquarters here is hardly a typical artist's atelier. But then Mr. Kinkade, arguably the most commercially successful painter of the 1990's, is hardly a typical artist.

In a large room lined with industrial sinks, dozens of workers in aprons and galoshes dunk reproductions of Mr. Kinkade's latest painting in water, peel off the paper backing and glue the flower-and-sunbeam-spangled landscape to stretched canvas. Down the hall, another room is filled with workers sitting before long rows of the canvas-backed reproductions, amplifying the picture's luminescent light effects by adding dots and squiggles of paint.

In a smaller studio nearby, three ''master highlighters'' trained personally by Mr. Kinkade do the same thing with more finesse and a wider range of colors. And in the vast warehouse out back, hundreds more people mat, frame, pack and ship the finished pictures to the 248 Thomas Kinkade galleries in malls and tourist Meccas all over the United States, where they'll be sold to eager collectors for anywhere from $600 to $10,000 and up.

Kinkade was wildly successful starting galleries and selling middlebrow art. "Kinkades" looked like real paintings, were fairly well composed, and often espoused Christian themes. He considered his work 'uplifting' rather than 'critical' or 'challenging'.

But Kinkade recently died at only 54 after slipping back into alcoholism, possibly drinking himself to death one evening. He was separated from his childhood sweetheart wife and four daughters—Merritt, Chandler, Winsor and Everett, all of whom share the middle name Christian—and living with a girlfriend. He had suffered some business reversals, but was still enormously wealthy. His behavior, though, took a dark turn.

a three-member panel of the American Arbitration Assn. ordered his company to pay $860,000 for defrauding the former owners of two failed Virginia galleries. That decision marks the first major legal setback for Kinkade, who won three previous arbitration claims. Five more are pending.

... Former gallery owners, ex-employees and others say his personal behavior also belies the wholesome image on which he's built his empire. In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman's breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind.

... Kinkade's proclivity for "ritual territory marking," ... allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. "This one's for you, Walt," the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, ...

That last part was funny because Kinkade also did paintings for Disney, featuring their characters and reproducing scenes from their animated films. Painting The Lion King can hardly have helped his reputation in the serious art world. Kinkade claimed not to care about criticism, but his brother blamed mean-spirited critics for the painter's personal decline.

Kinkade compared himself to Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell, expecting that he would similarly overcome critical disdain to become a beloved icon of popular art.

Rockwell is a far more accomplished draughtsman, though, and while I prefer Mucha to Parrish, all three tell far more interesting stories in their work than Kinkade. With his death, his paintings are selling well, but I'd rather buy something with a lot more original brushwork.