Alfred Parsons

Alfred William Parsons RA PRWS (2 December 1847 – 16 January 1920) was an English artist: illustrator, landscape painter and garden designer, working in oils and watercolour. Alfred Parsons was well known for his English landscape paintings and fine botanical illustrations which brought him into contact with William Robinson, for whom he provided illustrations. He regularly exhibited his art work from 1868 to 1919.

He also artistically designed significant gardens mostly in England and some in Scotland and the United States. Parsons and his contemporaries believed that an artist could design better gardens. He won the Chantrey Bequest in 1887 and published his illustrated book Notes From Japan in 1896.

Among many other works, he illustrated William Robinson's The Wild Garden (1883) and Ellen Willmott's The Genus Rosa. He was a keen gardener and for the last six years of his life took care of his roses at Luggershill, Broadway, Worcestershire, England. Having exhibited every year from 1874, he was elected Associate Member of the Royal Academy (ARA) in 1897 and Royal Academician (RA) in 1911.

These were mostly unpopulated landscape oils, which are now in many British museums. From 1882 to 1898 he belonged to, and exhibited at, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, before switching in 1899 to the rival Society of Painters in Watercolours in 1899 as ARWS, becoming full RWS in 1905, and finally president (PWRS) in 1913. Many of his watercolours reflect the fashion from the end of the 19th century for paintings of gardens, often concentrating on brightly-coloured borders.

Along with Walter Tyndale, he was slightly earlier in developing this genre than George Samuel Elgood or Ernest Arthur Rowe, who are perhaps the watercolourists most associated with it.