Ängar vid Avon – Alfred Parsons

Alfred Parsons was the kind of Victorian artist who could fill a gallery with landscapes and a library with illustrations, and do both well enough to be taken seriously at each. Born in Beckington, Somerset in 1847, he trained himself largely by doing, and by the time he reached London in the 1870s he was already making a reputation as a black-and-white illustrator for Harper's New Monthly Magazine and other American publications that paid well for English rural scenes.

It was his eye for gardens that set him apart. Parsons had a genuine feeling for the way English cottage and manor gardens worked: their colour sequences, their relationship to the surrounding landscape, the social world they implied. His collaboration with the gardening writer E.T. Cook on articles for various publications developed into a consistent visual language for the late Victorian garden, and his paintings were sought after by the country-house owners whose properties he depicted.

In 1891 he contributed illustrations to Henry James's collection of essays A Little Tour in France, though gardens rather than buildings remained his primary subject. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1911. Parsons also designed gardens professionally, most notably The Courts in Wiltshire, which he began laying out around 1900 and which passed eventually to the National Trust.

His watercolours have a directness that reads as almost modern: flat washes, clear light, plants described with botanical accuracy but without preciousness. He died in Broadway, Worcestershire in 1920, having spent many years in that colony of Anglo-American artists centred on John Singer Sargent and Francis Millet.