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Alfred William Parsons

Beckington, England, 1847 - 1920, Broadway, England

BiographyParsons, Alfred William (1847–1920), landscape painter, illustrator, and garden designer, was born at Beckington, Somerset, on 2 December 1847, the second son of Joshua Parsons (1814/15–1892), surgeon, of Beckington, and his wife, Letitia Harriet, née Williams (1823/4–1897). He was educated at private schools and entered the savings bank department of the Post Office as a clerk in 1865, but two years later (1867) he gave up his career in the civil service and devoted himself to painting. He trained briefly at the South Kensington School of Art.

Parsons exhibited widely, showing oils, watercolours, and pen-and-ink drawings. Early in his career he showed at the Dudley Gallery. The first appearance of his work at a Royal Academy exhibition was in 1871 and he continued to exhibit there until his death. He also contributed to exhibitions of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (and sat on the council of that body), the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, and the Royal Society of Artists in Birmingham. He submitted works to the Walker Art Gallery autumn exhibitions and the Manchester City Art Gallery exhibitions of watercolour drawings, as well as to international exhibitions, such as the world fair at St Louis (1904), where he was also responsible for arranging the display of British art works. He also showed with commercial galleries, including the Leicester Galleries, the Grosvenor Gallery, the New Gallery (where he also sat on the consulting committee), and the Fine Art Society. At the society he held a number of important one-man exhibitions, including ‘Gardens and orchards’ in 1891, for which the American writer Henry James wrote an exhibition catalogue essay.

Parsons also participated in the late nineteenth-century arts and crafts movement. In 1881 he joined William Morris's Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and helped to found the Art-Workers' Guild in 1884. Through his friendship with the American painter Edwin Austin Abbey, he participated in the American Tile Club. Abbey and Parsons were associated with the ‘Broadway group’, an informal gathering of painters and writers, including Henry James, F. D. Millet, and John Singer Sargent, who sojourned at Broadway, Worcestershire in the 1880s and 1890s. A member of many artistic organizations, Parsons joined the New English Art Club in 1886. Elected associate of the Royal Academy in 1897, he attained full membership in 1911. In 1899 he was elected associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, and he became a full member in 1905. Parsons was chosen president of the society, in succession to Sir Ernest Albert Waterlow, in 1913, and held that office until his death. In 1910 he joined the Imperial Arts League.

A very important section of Parsons's artistic output is formed by his work as a book illustrator, much of which appeared in Harper's Magazine. He also contributed the illustrations to The Genus Rosa by Ellen Willmott (1910), and collaborated with Edwin Austin Abbey in illustrating Robert Herrick's Hesperides and Noble Numbers (1882), She Stoops to Conquer (1887), Old Songs (1889), and The Quiet Life (1890), and with F. D. Millet in providing the illustrations for Millet's book The Danube, from the Black Forest to the Black Sea (1893). In 1892–4 Parsons paid a visit to Japan; he published his impressions of that country, with illustrations, in his book Notes in Japan (1896). Parsons also provided illustrations for several editions of William Robinson's The Wild Garden (1881, 1894), as well as for several of Robinson's gardening magazines and other publications.

In 1899 Parsons embarked on a career as a professional garden designer in partnership with Captain Walter Croker St Ives Partridge and Charles Clement Tudway. Extant examples of his work include Wightwick Manor, Staffordshire, and Great Chalfield, Wiltshire. His keen interest in gardens and flowers was reflected not only in his paintings and designs but also in his participation as judge at the Chelsea flower show.

Henry James claimed that Parsons possessed ‘an inexhaustible feeling for the country in general, [and] his love of the myriad English flowers is perhaps the fondest part of it’ (H. James, ‘Our artists in Europe’, Harper's Magazine, 79, 1889, 59). Parsons's landscape paintings embodied the naturalistic trend in nineteenth-century British landscape painting and reflected the influence of the French Barbizon school. In 1887 Parsons's painting of an orchard in springtime, When Nature Painted all things Gay (exh. RA, 1887; Tate collection), was purchased by the trustees of the Chantrey fund. His botanical illustrations were regarded as learned and correct. Collections holding examples of his work include the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Collection, and the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours. Parsons, who was unmarried, died at his house, Luggershill, at Broadway, Worcestershire, on 16 January 1920 and was cremated at Golders Green on 20 January.

Tancred Borenius, rev. Anne Helmreich
Sources

A. L. Helmreich, ‘Contested grounds: garden painting and the invention of national identity in England, 1880–1914’, PhD diss., Northwestern University, Illinois, 1994 · N. Milette, ‘Landscape-painter as landscape-gardener: the case of Alfred Parsons, R.A.’, DPhil diss., University of York, 1997 · ‘The Society of Painters in Water Colours: a list of members, associates and honorary members from its foundation, November 30, 1804’, [n.d.], Royal Water Colour Society, London · S. Houfe, The dictionary of British book illustrators and caricaturists, 1800–1914 (1978) · Graves, RA exhibitors · A. Robins, The New English Art Club centenary exhibition (1986) · M. S. Young, ‘The Tile Club revisited’, American Art Journal, 2 (1970), 81–91 · R. G. Pisano, The Tile Club and the aesthetic movement in America (1999) [exhibition catalogue, Stony Brook, NY, New London, CT, and Pittsburgh, PA, 9 Oct 1999 – 13 Aug 2000] · The Times (21 Jan 1920) · M. Simpson, ‘Windows on the past: Edwin Austin Abbey and Francis Davis Millett in England’, American Art Journal, 22 (1990), 65–89 · A. L. Helmreich, ‘Re-presenting nature: ideology, art and science in William Robinson's “Wild Garden”’, Nature and ideology: natural garden design in the twentieth century (1997), 81–111 · N. Milette, Parsons, Partridge, Tudway, an unsuspected design partnership, 1884–1914 (1995) · b. cert.
Archives

Hunt. L., corresp. · Worcs. RO, corresp.

Likenesses

Elliott & Fry, photograph, 1915, NPG · A. W. Parsons, self-portrait, pencil drawing, NPG · woodcut, repro. in H. James, ‘Our artists in Europe’, Harper's Magazine, 79 (1889), 59
Wealth at death

£18,401 10s. 1d.: probate, 27 March 1920, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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Tancred Borenius, ‘Parsons, Alfred William (1847–1920)’, rev. Anne Helmreich, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2007 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/35395, accessed 23 Oct 2017]

Alfred William Parsons (1847–1920): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/3539

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Last Updated8/7/24

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