Sculptor, the son of Solomon Williams, an Irish painter of portraits and historical subjects. He studied at the Dublin Society Schools under the sculptor John Smyth, showing at the Dublin Society’s exhibitions in 1815, 1817 and 1819 and winning the first prize for sculpture in 1816. In 1820 he relocated to London and entered the Royal Academy Schools, winning silver medals in 1820 and 1823. He showed in six of the annual Royal Academy exhibitions between 1822 and 1832, a mixture of ideal subjects and portrait busts, one of the latter, in 1824, being of the sculptor John Charles Felix Rossi. Richard Williams is believed to be the ‘Mr. Williams’ who, according to J.T. Smith, in Nollekens and his Times, carved a Seated Venus for George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, while working as one of Rossi’s assistants. The Seated Venus is a faithful copy of a plaster model by Joseph Nollekens, purchased by Egremont at a posthumous sale of Nollekens’ unsold works at Christie’s on 3 July 1823. Egremont engaged Rossi to carve the model’s translation into marble so that he could add it to his sculpture collection at his country seat, Petworth House, in West Sussex. Rossi, in turn, delegated the task to Williams who was to carry it out under his supervision. Williams was clearly a highly skilled practitioner, later telling Smith ‘that in no instance could he have been engaged upon a more difficult task, especially in carving parts that were so intricately undercut; as the right hand of the figure placed before the right leg, was within a quarter of an inch of the shin-bone, and he had to invent tools of the most singular shapes to enable him to cut and file away the stone.’ Williams had become a member of the Artists’ Annuity Fund in 1822, which was just as well as he became blind in 1841. None of the works he carried out to his own designs have been traced.
Bibliography: A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts. A complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, (8 vols, 1905–06), Vol VIII (Toft–Zwecker), 1906, p. 292; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, p. 1382; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 156–57; J.T. Smith, Nollekens and his Times, (1828), London, 1986, pp. 306, 307; W.G. Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists (2 vols), Dublin and London, 1913, Vol. 2, p. 536.
Terry Cavanagh, April 2025