Alfred Hair could be to American painting what Robert Johnson is to the blues.

The Fort Pierce, Fla., native was a gifted, charismatic, ambitious ladies' man who led a revolution in African-American folk expression before he was killed in his prime.

Hair left behind a legacy of spectacular, vivid paintings of the Florida landscape -- luminous, impressionistic tableaus in which waves crash, birds wheel and palm trees bend seductively.

In her coffee-table-worthy collection of 204 plates, Catherine M. Enns, herself a Fort Pierce resident, focuses in part on Hair, whose artistic and commercial genius spearheaded a movement of 26 artists who, decades later, became known as the Highwaymen because they sold their works out of cars along the byways of South Florida.

Years before Andy Warhol's Factory, Hair created "fast painting," an assembly line that churned out dozens, even hundreds, of landscapes a day on cheap Upson boards that were sold for around $35 a pop.

He wasn't the first local artist to create what were essentially hand-crafted, oversized postcards -- that honor goes to Harold Newton, the son of a sharecropper -- but he was the most successful and one of the most talented.

But there's another story Enns tells in her rather thinly researched 100-page introductory essay. It's the role played by A.E. Backus, the also successful Fort Pierce landscape painter in whose studio Newton and Hair first learned their trade.

She pairs Backus' work with those of his prodigies. Hair and others frequently painted the same scenes as the older, schooled painter, who was apparently responsible for teaching the Highwaymen to use Upson board and to paint with palette knives, two of the defining characteristics of their work.

But the comparisons also show that even though they produced their work quickly on the cheap, the Highwaymen often outshone their teacher.

The paintings are the centerpiece of this elegant volume, and they are frequently spectacular. Drawing from the collection of Jonathan Otto, Enns groups the plates by favored subject matters -- Royal Poinciana, Indian River, Backcountry Pines.

This is commercial work, frequently sentimental and sometimes surreal in its bright colors. The painting is often primitive and slapdash, but somehow Hair could make a simple slash of green tremble with photosynthetic life.

Trained by only Backus and churning out their work en masse, the Highwaymen are generally seen as "low," outsider artists. Certainly, there's no heavy concept or political statement in Hair's work, but Enns says there's an important sociological story here:

"It seemed nearly impossible that a black man -- and one barely out of his teens -- living in the South of that time, bound by the stigma of a small town, and using only the basic tools of his craft, could be making money by making art."

Before his 1970 death at 29, Hair found a way to become a self-made millionaire -- and to be the Van Gogh or Warhol of 20th-century black American art.