Alfred William Parsons was an English artist, illustrator, landscape painter, and garden designer.
Background
Alfred Parsons was born on December 12, 1847, in Beckington near Frome, Somerset, the second of seventeen children of Dr. Joshua Parsons, a surgeon and dedicated gardener of alpines and correspondent of William Robinson, and Letitia Harriet Parsons (née Williams). Alfred was raised in London.
Education
Alfred Parsons received private education.
Career
After being educated privately, Alfred Parsons started work as a clerk in the Post Office in 1867. After two years, he left the unsuitable desk-job to pursue studies at the Kensington School of Art and went on to exhibit at various galleries including the Grosvenor Gallery and the Royal Academy, where he exhibited every year from 1874 to the end of his life.
Parsons, whose interest in "Englishness" paralleled the tastes of upper-class American émigrés, joined the notable artistic community in the village of Broadway in the Cotswolds (Worcestershire). His associates included the American artists Francis Davis Millet, who remained Parson's closest friend until he drowned aboard the Titanic, and Edwin Austin Abbey, with whom he collaborated in illustrated books. Through American contacts made while at the artists' colony he became an illustrator for Harper's Magazine and also provided illustrations for books – including short stories by Thomas Hardy and travel books.
The three men, Parsons, Millet, and Abbey, lived together and entertained sociably at 54, Bedford Gardens, London. William Robinson asked him to provide illustrations for “The Wild Garden: Or, Our Groves and Shrubberies Made Beautiful by the Naturalisation of Hardy Exotic Plants” (1881) led to Robinson's invitation for Parsons to lend advice at his “Gravetye Manor.” Several artists engraved Parsons' illustrations. As it was the custom, he never engraved himself. Parsons' first garden commission, however, came through the architect Philip Webb, who was designing Clouds in Wiltshire for Mr and Mrs Percy Wyndham, prominent figures among the aesthetic-minded group called The Souls: Parsons provided an unostentatious planting of spring bulbs, Magnolia × soulangeana, roses and lilies, in a framework of clipped yews, wedding new and old elements.
Parsons' long-lasting association with the Anglo-American group centered in Broadway, began in 1885, when Parsons and his London friends rented a house facing the Green, where John Singer Sargent began painting “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.” Parsons first made a garden for himself and his friends at Russell House facing the Evesham road at the western entrance to Broadway, then a garden setting for Mary Anderson, Mrs Antonio de Navarro at Court Farm and later for himself, at Luggershill.
Parsons' fine illustrated book, his only published text, “Notes in Japan” (London, 1895) came from his visit to that country between 1892 and 1894. Ellen Willmott's “The Genus Rosa”, published in two volumes between 1910 and 1914, included 132 watercolors of roses painted by Parsons between 1890 and 1908, which are now held by the Lindley Library in London. Willmott also commissioned Parsons to paint her three gardens.
As a designer of gardens, Parsons went into partnership in 1898 with Captain Walter Croker St-Ives Partridge, as Parsons and Partridge of Newbury, Berkshire. In 1884 they took into the partnership Charles Clement Tudway. Parson's restorations of old gardens and designs of sympathetic settings for old houses can be appreciated at 15th-century Great Chalfield Manor and at Elizabethan Littlecote House, both in Wiltshire. Alfred Parsons and Walter Partridge also worked on the gardens at Welbeck Abbey during 1899 - 1905 and at Bryngarw, Glamorganshire. An early essay was Wightwick Manor, a reproduction black-and-white house, for which Parsons provided the garden in 1887. He died on January 16, 1920 at Broadway, Worcestershire.
Views
Parsons and his contemporaries believed that an artist could design better gardens.
Membership
Parsons became President of the Society of Painters in Watercolours in 1905. He was elected Associate Member of the Royal Academy in 1897 and Royal Academician in 1911.
Personality
He was a keen gardener and for the last six years of his life took care of his roses at Luggershill, Broadway, Worcestershire, England. Temperamentally, he was a highly sociable bachelor who loved parties, who had also a keen sense of justice and business capacity that made him invaluable to colleagues.
Physical Characteristics:
In appearance he was a short square man with bright blue eyes and a sweet smile, which revealed one broken tooth, which “gave somehow – in spite of a beard – the impression of a small boy” … This was exaggerated by his inability to say the letter “r.”