By Walter Williams
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
The Pastoral Landscape
by Walter Williams (British 1834-1906)
oil painting on canvas, framed
canvas: 30.25 x 50 inches
framed: 36 x 56 inches
condition: very good and highly presentable
provenance:
originally with Mandells Gallery, Norwich
Sotheby's, 27 October 1992, lot 181, where purchased by the previous owner;
By whom sold Mallams, Cheltenham, 10 June 2015, lot 657, where purchased by the present private collector, England.
A very fine large scale Victorian oil painting depicting this tranquil river landscape. A lovely pastoral scene, with figures angling, a distant windmill to the far left and cattle grazing on the far river bank. Painted on this vast scale, it is almost like a window looking out over the scene...
Walter Williams (1834-1906) was an English landscape painter during the Victorian era, and a member of the famous 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 (1832-1872), with whom he had two children - Florence Ada Williams (1859-1927) 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.
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). His first wife Jane Williams...
Category
19th Century Victorian Walter Williams Landscape Paintings
