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. He became a painter like his father, and married another painter Jane Pearcy (1832-1872), with whom he had two children - Florence Ada Williams (1859-1927) and Cyril Stanley Williams (b 1863) - both of whom became painters as well, but neither of whom achieved any measurable degree of success as artists.
Some sources attribute to him a twin brother named George. However, as his baptismal record proves, George and Walter are the same person. He is commonly confused with a contemporary, but different, landscape painter named Walter Heath Williams, to whom he is not related.
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.
Williams lived at 8 Lonsdale Terrace in Surrey for most of his life, and he exhibited a total of 81 paintings at the Royal Academy (10 works), the British Institution (14 works) and the Society of British Artists (47 works). He finally 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 on 14 April 1906 in a poorhouse in Richmond, Surrey and was buried in a pauper"s grave.
Though incorrectly credited sometimes to Walter Heath Williams, an example of the work of Walter Williams, son of George Augustus Williams is The Pass at Llanberris in the Harris Museum & Art Gallery at Preston Lancashire. Examples probably exist in other British museums as well that are wrongly attributed to his namesake.
