Fred Williams in the studio next to his painting Gorge landscape,1981
Fred Williams working, by Robert Walker
Ethnicity:
His parents came from Victoria, a south-eastern state of Australia.
Frederick Ronald Williams was born on January, 23 in 1927 in Richmond, Victoria, Australia. He was a third child of Albert Augustus Williams, an electrical engineer, and Florence Myrtle, nee Phillips, a housewife.
Fred's father wished that he would become an architect, but Frederick in his early childhood chose an artistic career.
After leaving school at the age of fourteen, Fred Williams became an apprentice on a Melbourne firm of shopfitters and box makers. In November 1943, Williams enrolled in evening drawing classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School where as a part-time student, he learned the classical drawing techniques. Three years later, as a full-time student, he started to attend the life class of the Gallery. Fred left the institution in 1947.
In search of more training in technique, composition and art history, young Williams joined the following year the independent school of a modern artist George Bell in Melbourne which he had attended for three years.
One year later, the artist moved to London where he entered the Chelsea School of Art (now Chelsea College of Art and Design) again as a part-time student. While in London, Williams discovered the artworks presented in the British Museum and in many dealer galleries, including the prints of Rembrandt and Goya which provided him with an interest in etching. That’s why, in 1953, Williams subscribed for a one term in a night course of the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Passionate with this genre, the artist made about fifty-three etchings of London music-hall subjects.
Fred Williams pursued his artistic studies after his return in Melbourne by exploring the art of such famous painters, as Paul Cézanne, later the Cubists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
The painter received an Honorary Doctorate of Law (Honoris Causa) in 1980 from the Monash University.
Fred's first job from which he started his professional activity in 1943 wasn’t related with painting – he worked at the drafting office of T. S. Gill, Prahran, Victoria, Australia. Then, in London, Williams occupied a post at a local picture-framer in 1951. The same year, along with his friends, Ian Armstrong and Harry Rosengrave, Fred Williams for the first time demonstrated his paintings and portraits to the public at the Stanley Coe Gallery in February 1951. Since 1957, the artist had regular exhibitions which central subjects were landscapes, such as his first creations based on the Nattai River (1957-1958).
The turning point of Williams’s career was in 1962 when the painter joined the Rudy Komon Art Gallery in Sydney as one of its leading artists what allowed him to leave his part-time work with a picture-framer. Williams’s first exhibition that brought him great fortune was organized in the Gallery in 1967.
During the 1970s, Fred Williams moved from vertical format to horizontal one in his paintings, among which were the West Gate Bridge series (1970) depicting the unfinished West Gate Bridge over the Yarra River in Melbourne and Beachscape with bathers Queenscliff I-IV series (1971). Other remarkable examples of this period, The Beachscape, Erith Island gouache pictures, were created while the trip to Erith Island in Bass Strait along with historians Stephen Murray-Smith, Ian Turner, and a painter Clifton Pugh in March 1974.
Three years later, Fred Williams had a great chance to enlarge the number of his art admirers by exhibiting his gouaches at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The show was successful, and the artist received many offers to represent his work in the capital of the United States again. However, the artist refused and continued his painting activity in Melbourne.
Fred Williams made his last significant and later the most known creations, Pilbara series, by a commission from the mining company Con-Zinc Rio Tinto Group which invited the artist to explore and paint the outback mining operations of Comalco Ltd at Weipa on Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, Australia.
Fred Williams was a prolific and successful painter and engraver, whose distinguished talent in drawing Australian landscapes was widely recognized while alive and after his death. So, in 1963, the artist received the most prestigious prize by the time, Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship, for the paintings Landscape with a steep road (1957), Landscape with a building I (about 1957-58), The forest pond (about 1959-60), Sherbrooke Forest (1960) and The St George River (1960).
During his artistic career, Williams made about 400 prints including 239 landscape etchings, and a great number of oils and gouaches which were shown at more than seventy solo exhibitions in his native Australia, as well as abroad, for example, at the exhibition called Fred Williams Landscapes of a Continent at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1977 or at the retrospective of his London music-hall etchings, Fred Williams: From Music Hall to Landscape, organized at theBritish Museum in 2004.
Some of Williams creations, such as Upwey Landscape (1965) and Landscape with Water Ponds (1965), broke the sell records of different auction houses, including the most expensive, Evening Sky, Upwey (1965), which was bought at the Australian auction in 2009 for $1.15 million.
The edition of 2007 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die by Quintessence Editions Ltd. featured the couple of Fred Williams’ paintings, Dry Creek Bed, Werribee Gorge I (1977) and Drifting Smoke (1981). Williams' artworks are also listed in 100 Masterpieces of Australian Landscape Painting by William Splatt.
Nowadays, the artist’s heritage can been seen in Australia, United States, and United Kingdom in such well reputed museums and galleries as the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (paintings and art on paper), the Tate Gallery and the British Museum in London.
Hillock
Seascape with Boat Mornington
Hillside I
Boab trees, Kimberley's
Red Landscape
Waterpond in a Landscape II
Iron ore landscape
Yellow Landscape
Landscape with Goose
Upwey Landscape II
Landscape with Acacias
Dight's Falls
Sapling Forest
Sapling Forest
Saplings Mittagong II
Landscape with rock
The forest pond
Landscape with a steep road
The Saint George River
Evening Sky, Upwey
Dry Creek Bed, Werribee Gorge I
Drifting Smoke
Sherbrooke Forest
Mt. Kosciusko
Self portrait with dog
Crouching nude, back study
Drawing for Vaudeville. Juggler
Chalk Creek
Stump
George Bell
Quotations: "I don’t want to give the impression that I love the bush, and because I love it I want other people to love it. I simply want to paint pictures from it.'
Quotes from others about the person
"Fred brought us a new vision of Australia’s landscape at least as valid and impressive as any of the two or three major illuminations which went before it. He changed the way we see our country: an achievement which will live long after all of us are gone." John Brack, an Australian painter
Fred Williams met his future wife, Lyn Watson, in 1960 when he worked in Sherbroke, Australia. They married in a year, on March and settled down in South Yarra. The couple had three children, all girls. Their names were Isobel, Louise and Kate.
For some time, the family had lived in Upwey, Victoria outside Melbourne, where they came in 1963.
At the end of 1960s, the couple moved to Hawthorn, Melbourne, Australia.
He was a painter.
He was an Australian artist.
He was an Australian painter.
He was an Australian painter known for Alice in Wonderland series.
He was an art dealer and a gallery director.
He was an Australian writer, editor and educator.
He was an Australian artist.
He was an Australian painter.
