WILLIAMS, Walter - b. 1834 Barnes, d. 1906 Richmond

English painter, part of the Williams family of painters, son of George Augustus Williams, grandson of Edward Williams (1782-1855). He became a painter like his father, and married another painter Jane Pearcy (1832-1872).

Walter Williams was a landscape painter who 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. He is commonly confused with a contemporary, but different, landscape painter named Walter Heath Williams, to whom he is not related.

Williams lived in Barnes, Surrey for most of his life, and he exhibited a total of 81 paintings at the Royal Academy, the British Institution and the Society of British Artists. He left his home in poverty in 1902 to enter a work house, and soon lost contact with family and friends.

He died at the age of 71 in a poorhouse in Richmond, Surrey.