As a painter, prolific illustrator for Harper’s Magazine and books by popular English authors, also as a designer of gardens in Britain and America, Alfred Parsons played a role in catering to and shaping his American contemporaries’ concept of “Englishness.” In 1879, American author Henry James wrote, “Was it [in America] that Mr. Parsons learned so well how Americans would like England to appear?...The England of his pencil... is exactly the England that the American imagination, restricted to itself, constructs from the poets, the novelists, from all the delightful testimony it inherits.
Bedfordshire, about 50 miles north-northwest of London, is a picturesque area of rolling farmland dotted by towns. In Parsons’ time, it would have been seen as accessible yet unspoiled by modern life.
Text: Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), CC BY 4.0.
