Alfred Parsons, RA, PRWS (1847-1920) and the Japanese Watercolour Movement

Alfred Parsons, an English painter, illustrator and garden designer, visited Japan in 1892 to paint Japanese landscape. He organised a small exhibition of his watercolours in Tokyo. Kokki Miyake, a young Japanese painter visited this exhibition and was so excited that he vowed to concentrate just on watercolours from nature. This exhibition and also a serialised translation of his 'Notes in Japan' in a Japanese art magazine became the catalyst for the new Japanese Watercolour movement. This chapter analyses this phenomenon and also how Parsons made more or less inadvertently a major contribution to the modernisation of Japanese landscape painting.