Portraitist William M. J. Rice received a degree in architecture from Cornell University in 1874. In New York City, his principal art teacher was J. Carroll Beckwith (of whom he became a good friend) at the Art Students League. He also worked under Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran in Paris from 1881 to 1884, probably acting on advice from Beckwith, a former pupil of Carolus-Duran.
Upon his return to New York, Rice moved into the largest studio in the Sherwood Building, where he appears to have been a popular, quiet, and everpresent inhabitant of the young artists' community. Neighbors such as Howard Russell Butler and Edwin Blashfield later told anecdotes emphasizing his painful lack of assertiveness. Butler once called him "the quietest, shyest, most diffident and self-effacing man I ever met" (H.R. Butler Papers). Although he was elected to the Society of American Artists in 1886, the National Academy waited another 14 years before elevating him to its ranks. Late in life, Rice took up landscape subjects in the paintings he submitted to Academy Annuals. His NAD obituary, written by Edwin Blashfield, neglected to consider his art but stressed his gentleness, delicacy, and frailty in the course of relating several humorous stories concerning his life in the Sherwood Building.