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Decades of mean-spirited personal attacks against Thomas Kinkade for the bucolic images of storybook cottages he painted, as well as a heartbreaking split from his wife and four daughters two years ago, had taken a toll on the famous "Painter of Light," his brother said Thursday.

He turned to the bottle, battling alcoholism over the past four or five years, Patrick Kinkade said of his brother in an exclusive interview with this newspaper. Even though he had sobered up and had been "in his studio painting religiously" over the past few months, he said, Thomas Kinkade had a relapse just before his death last Friday at his hillside home in Monte Sereno.

A fire department dispatcher sent Engine 8 to respond to the Kinkade home on Ridgecrest Avenue, where Kinkade's girlfriend had called police. "Fifty-four-year-old male unconscious, not breathing," the dispatcher says in a recording by firescan.net, "apparently he's been drinking all night and not moving."

Patrick Kinkade called his brother a brilliant and prolific artist and intellectual, but one who fought inner demons.

"He would shoulder the world, pull the naysayers on his back and smile when he was doing it," said Patrick Kinkade, an associate professor of criminal justice at Texas Christian University. "As much as he said it didn't bother him, in his heart deep down inside it would sadden him that people would criticize so hatefully his work and his vision when people didn't understand him."

Kinkade's paintings depicting dreamy scenes of candlelit cottages, stone bridges and garden gates was shunned by art critics as tacky and kitsch, but adored by Main Street Americans when reproduced on affordable canvasses, coffee cups and calendars. By 2005, the company was one of the top 50 licensed brands in the country, with more retail sales than MTV, said Dan Byrne, former president and chief executive officer of the Morgan Hill-based Thomas Kinkade empire. Kinkade and his founding partner, Ken Raasch, came up with the idea of "painter of light" on a road trip.

"What people were responding to was the way his paintings made them feel," Byrne said. "We used to call it a 20-second vacation on their wall. People wanted to put themselves into the picture in their imagination. He wanted to give people a way to celebrate the good things in the world around them and visually take a little break in what they contend with day to day."

The images showed pictures of the way Kinkade wished the world would be, his brother said. The Kinkades grew up in the Sierra mountain town of Placerville, "poor, very poor," his brother said. With a mostly absentee father, the two boys, 18 months apart, their older sister and mother lived in a small house so ramshackle that the front porch broke off, cardboard patched a broken window and ceiling plaster fell onto the dinner table.

Kinkade showed artistic talent since he was 3. He had the good fortune of being mentored by artists, Charlie Bell and then Glenn Wessells, who used a Placerville horse barn as a studio. Wessells was chair of the art department at UC Berkeley and encouraged Kinkade to enroll. Kinkade married his wife, Nanette, in 1982, a girl he met on his paper route.

In 1992, Thomas Kinkade painted his first "Victorian Christmas" of a grand Victorian home in Placerville. "It was a fine house with fine people living there, with big parties," Patrick Kinkade recalls. "Tom and I would stand outside the gates and say, 'that's the kind of house I want to live in.' We were always on the outside of the gate looking in."

When Kinkade finished the painting, he told his brother to look closely: "He painted two little boys riding sleds down the hillside," Patrick Kinkade said. "Tom and I finally made it on the inside. I still to this day get chills."