Alfred Parsons (artist)
painter from Great Britain (1847-1920)

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.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4723267. VIAF identifies the subject as 45397746. The Library of Congress control number is n88063325. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1847, 1920, 1868 and 1919.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alfred Parsons (artist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.