Williams studied at the Chicago Art Institute, the Phillips Exeter Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and Yale University, Hartford, Connecticut, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1919. He received a graduate degree in architecture from Harvard in 1922 and was in Paris for eight years where he studied at Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Jules Coutan. On returning to the United States in 1928, he specialized in carving of allegorical reliefs. During the 1930s, he completed works in this genre for the Interstate Commerce Building, Washington, D.C., and for the post offices on Canal Street, New York, and in Bay Shore, Long Island. The last two commissions were done under the auspices of the Federal Works Agency.
Williams also created the monument Settling of the Seaboard, done in 1941 for Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, and the two large allegorical figures representing the odd pair of Venus and Manhattan executed in the early 1950s for the facade of the Parke-Bernet Galleries on Madison Avenue in New York. He created a number of fountain figures, for example, The Wave of Life Fountain for the Prudential Building in Houston, Texas, and the Rhthym of the Waves Fountain for the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club in Detroit. The model for the former work was shown at the National Academy in 1960 (cat. no. 4). His eight small, lead fountain sculptures of the gods as children - Neptune, Hercules, and Venus, for example - were exhibited at the Arden Gallery in New York in 1940. Four of these are now at Brookgreen Gardens. Evidence of Williams's competence as an animalier is seen in a number of his bronze creatures which are at Brookgreen as well.
Williams became an active exhibitor at the National Academy beginning in 1938 and won the Ellin Speyer Memorial Prize here for his Black Panthers in 1940 (cat. no. 310). He served as president of the National Sculpture Society and was a founder and president of the American Artist Professional League. He was active in the armed forces during both world wars.
