Edward Williams (painter)

Edward Williams (1781 – 24 June 1855) was an English landscape painter during the Victorian era. He had six sons, who were well-known landscape painters as well. Williams is considered the patriarch of the Williams family of painters, which is also referred to as the Barnes School.

Although 1782 is usually given for his birth date, Edward Williams was actually born in 1781 in London, and baptized 13 October 1781 at St. Mary's Church in the Lambeth district. His mother Mary Ward was a sister of James Ward, the well-known animal painter, and a sister of the equally well-known engraver William Ward. She was also a sister-in-law of the brilliant figure painter George Morland, and a sister-in-law of Henry Chalon, another animal painter. His father, also named Edward Williams, was an engraver who worked with the master mezzotint engraver John Raphael Smith, and ran with a notorious group of drinkers that included the aforementioned George Morland, and Thomas Rowlandson the caricaturist. As such, the younger Williams grew up surrounded by artists, of whom Ward and Moreland were two the best-known painters in Georgian London.

Edward Williams, junior was sent around 1792 or 1793 to live with his maternal uncle James Ward, R.A. (1769–1859), but it seems unlikely that he received any painting instruction from him. Instead he was informally apprenticed to a carver and gilder named Thomas Hillier, who had a shop on Carnaby Street. Ultimately young Williams did become a painter, yet not a figure painter like his uncles, but a landscape painter, which, given his heritage is surprising as this was an age when landscape artists were considered inferior to figure painters. Although he never attained the fame of his uncles, he was nonetheless successful enough to enjoy a comfortable living. More important though, he fathered six sons, all artists like himself, who carried on the styles of landscape painting that he taught them, and some of whom were among the most popular landscape artists of the Victorian era.

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