Fred Williams

Frederick Ronald Williams (23 January 192722 April 1982) was an Australian painter and printmaker. He was one of Australia's most important artists, and one of the twentieth century's major landscapists. He had more than seventy solo exhibitions during his career in Australian galleries, as well as the exhibition Fred Williams - Landscapes of a Continent at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1977.

Early life and education Fred Williams was born on 23 January 1927 in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, the son of an electrical engineer and a Richmond housewife.

Williams' landscapes recorded the passage of the Yarra River from its source to its mouth.

In 1960, Williams was invited to enter for the Helena Rubenstein Travelling Art Scholarship, the richest and most prestigious art prize at the time with an award of £1000 plus £300 travel expenses aimed at giving the winner overseas experience. Five paintings were required for his entry and he selected Landscape with a steep road (1957), Landscape with a building I (c. 1957–58), The forest pond (c. 1959–60), Sherbrooke Forest (1960) and The St George River (1960). In 1970, Williams produced a group of four large strip format gouache-on-paper paintings called the West Gate Bridge series showing the half-constructed West Gate Bridge over the Yarra River in Melbourne. A section of the bridge collapsed on 15 October 1970, while it was still under construction, killing thirty-five workers. Williams had planned to paint the length of the river, but his widow, Lyn said he "lost heart in the project" after the accident. In his Beachscape with bathers Queenscliff I-IV series from 1971, Williams painted from the top of a cliff overlooking the beach during a seaside holiday. Poor weather prevented Williams and his friends from leaving the island when they had intended.

In 1976, Williams flew over the Northern Territory at night on his way to an art fair in Bologna, Italy. He saw lines of bushfires burning and later that year produced the twelve-sheeted gouache series, Bushfire in Northern Territory.

In February 1979, Williams visited the Lal Lal Falls on the Moorabool River to the west of Melbourne near Ballarat and painted the Lal Lal polyptych, a four panel painting that he regarded as a single work. The successive canvases of the polyptych depict the changes in light on the waterfall and the surrounding landscape. He described the studio painting as "a major effort on my part" and it is regarded as one of the most important works of his career.

In the last years of his career, Williams produced more landscape series with strong themes, his last being the Pilbara series (1979–81), which remained intact as it was acquired by Con-Zinc Rio Tinto Group, the mining company that had invited him to explore the arid north-west region of Australia.

Awards Williams received a Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship in 1963. In 1976 he was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and awarded a Doctorate of Law (Honoris Causa) by Monash University in 1980. and in 1976 with Mt. Kosciusko.

His painting Upwey Landscape (1965) sold for $1,987,700 in one of the final auctions of Christie's in Australia in April 2006, which at the time was the second highest price for any work sold at an Australian auction. In September 2007, auction house Deutscher-Menzies broke their sales record with Williams' Landscape with Water Ponds (1965) selling for $1,860,000. The most expensive work sold at an Australian auction in 2009 was Williams' 1965 Evening Sky, Upwey, which sold for $1.15 million.

Two of Williams' paintings, Dry Creek Bed, Werribee Gorge I (1977) and Drifting Smoke (1981) were included in Quintessence Editions Ltd.'s 2007 edition of 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die. Williams' work is also represented in William Splatt's 100 Masterpieces of Australian Landscape Painting.

Personal life Williams met Lyn Watson in January 1960 while painting at Sherbrooke. They were married in March 1961 and moved to the inner-city suburb of South Yarra. They had three daughters: Isobel, Louise and Kate. In 1963, the couple moved to Upwey in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne, a location that would have a decisive impact on his work. In 1964 they travelled through Europe on a Helena Rubenstein Scholarship. In 1969, Williams moved to Hawthorn, an inner suburb of Melbourne.

Death and legacy In November 1981, Williams was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He died less than six months later in Hawthorn on 22 April 1982, aged 55. Fellow artist and friend John Brack gave the eulogy at his funeral. He said Lyn bought a former factory in inner-Melbourne in 1989 and has managed the artist's estate from there since she sorted through his studio at their former home in Hawthorn.

Major collections Art Gallery of New South Wales Art Gallery of Western Australia Holmes à Court Collection