The English Years
Exposed to work from the School of Paris, exhibitions of Impressionist and post-Impressionist works at the Tate and other galleries in England, Williams also learnt etching and printing techniques at the Chelsea Art School and Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. He experimented with these techniques to produce vivid caricatured sketches of contemporary London life. These works contrast markedly to those which were to signal Williams' early success, yet it was during this period that he established his method of reworking the same motif a number of times in a number of mediums and, often, over a number of years.

   
 

The Metropolitan 1952-1954

  

gouache 50.0 x 47.0 cm

    
      Here Williams' vibrant use of a strong Matissian, carnivalesque colour scheme contrasts highly with the sombre palette he was to use in his early figurative and landscape work.    
 

Mayfield Barn West Wittering 1953-1954

  

oil on composition board 51.0 x 54.5 cm

    
      This work demonstrates Monet's influence on Williams. Mayfield Barn is highly reminiscent of Monet's Hayricks, yet there is an implicit sense of heaviness and isolation in this scene, despite the violet tones and golden play of sunlight.    
 

Chiswick 1952-1954

  

oil on composition board 74.0 x 59.7 cm

    
      Williams' English landscapes demonstrate the influence not only of Matisse, but of English landscape painters, Turner and Whistler. Yet Williams absorbs these influences into a personal vision which is at once indebted to his predecessors and yet bears the strong mark of his own originality.    
 

The Little Man 1955-1957

  

oil on composition board 106.0 x 68.0 cm

    
      There is a strong sense of pathos in this study of an almost grotesquely distorted and foreshortened figure. Williams does not 'prettify' his experience of London and Londoners in the 1950s.    
 

Trapeze 1955-1956

  

etching 20.0 x 16.3 cm

    
      The Music Hall theme featured highly in Williams' London drawings and etchings. The artist positioned himself as spectator, not participant, of London society and culture, and the resulting works are often lively and animated studies of performers and their audiences, though not without an underlying sense of melancholy, as felt both by the artist as an outsider, and the subject (the music hall entity) as a victim of circumstance.    
 

The Haircut 1955-1956

  

etching 23.0 x 13.0 cm

    
      Williams painted people without sentimentalising them, observing them engaged in casual everyday activities, not in picturesque poses. The working methods of Degas, amongst others, are present in his treatment of the subject here.    
 

Tree Loppers 1955

  

oil on composition board 102.0 x 69.5 cm

    
      Here it is English rural life and activity which interests Williams rather than the countryside itself. He manages this aspect better than he does pure landscape painting, which remains, at this stage, peripheral to his main concerns.    
 

Sussex Village 1953-1955

  

oil on board 59.5 x 89.0 cm

    
      Perhaps the most successful of William's English rural scenes, in Sussex Village shafts of golden light are cast against sombre shadowed walls creating the drama of a storm brewing in a dull sky - the dynamics of light at play in concrete form.    
             

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