Williams was a landscape artist from Maesteg, Glamorgan. His father Evan Williams intended him to be a doctor, but he disliked the idea. A visit to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, in 1892, where he spent some hours in front of Frederick Leighton's 'Perseus and Andromeda', revealed a new world to him. He left the gallery with a firm decision that he would be an artist. He studied first in Neath under the artist F. J. Kerr and later at the Royal College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. During the First World War, he painted 'The Welsh Charge at Mametz Wood', now in the Welsh National Museum. He painted many landscapes in Wales, Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain, Morocco and Holland. Amongst his landscape scenes are 'The Red Dress' at the National Museum of Wales and 'Holidays, Village Girls at Llangrannog' in the collection of the National Library of Wales.