Walter Williams

Who is Walter Williams?

Walter Williams was an English landscape painter during the Victorian era, and a member of the Williams family of painters.

He was born George Walter Williams on 29 November 1834 in London, being the son of the well-known Victorian landscape painter George Augustus Williams and his wife Caroline Smith. Some sources attribute to him a twin brother named George. However, as his baptismal record proves, George and Walter are the same person. He became a painter like his father, and married another painter Jane Pearcy, with whom he had two children - Florence Ada Williams and Cyril Stanley Williams - both of whom became painters as well, but neither of whom achieved any measurable degree of success as artists. Walter remarried two more times, after the deaths of each of his previous wives.

He is commonly confused with a contemporary, but different, landscape painter named Walter Heath Williams, to whom he is not related. The former generally signed his works Walter Williams or W. Williams, whereas the latter used Walter H. Williams or simply W.H. Williams, the similarity in their signatures adding to the confusion between the two artists. Walter Williams generally painted subjects similar to those by the rest of his family, with bodies of still water next to dense thickets of trees against backdrops of hills and clouds. His paintings tend to be dark in tone with a profusion of green. By contrast, Walter Heath Williams painted landscapes that are much lighter and brighter in tone, characterized by yellows and light browns, his favorite subjects being farm fields with corn stalks and piles of hay.