Mowing time

Alfred William Parsons worked as a graphic illustrator, painter and professional garden designer. Around the time he painted this watercolour, he was drawn into the so-called Broadway Group – a coterie of expatriate American artists and writers at Broadway in the Cotswolds, whose members included John Singer Sargent and Henry James. James claimed that Parsons possessed ‘an inexhaustible feeling for the country in general … his love of the myriad English flowers is perhaps the fondest part of it’. Parsons’ work helped perpetuate the myth of England as a rural utopia.