Frederick Ronald (Fred) Williams OBE (23 January 1927 – 22 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 painters of the landscape. 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.

Fred Williams was born in 1927 in Melbourne. From 1943 to 1947 he studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, at first part-time and then full-time from 1945 at the age of 16. The Gallery School was traditional and academic, with a long and prestigious history. He also began lessons under George Bell the following year, who had his own art school in Melbourne. This continued until 1950. Bell was a conservative modern artist but a very influential teacher.

Between 1951 and 1956, Williams studied part-time at the Chelsea School of Art, London (now Chelsea College of Art and Design) and in 1954 he did an etching course at the Central School of Arts and Craft. He subsidised his art practice by working in a picture-framer’s shop. He returned to Melbourne in 1957.

He had work included in the ‘Recent Australian Painting’ exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and ‘Australian Painting: Colonial, Impressionism, Modern’ at the Tate Gallery.

He married Lyn Watson in 1960, and they had three daughters: Isobel, Louise and Kate. In 1963 the couple moved to Upwey, Victoria 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.

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.

Williams won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting twice; in 1966 with Upwey Landscape 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 was the second highest price for an Australian work. The previous highest price for one of Williams’ paintings was $5,875,000 for You Yangs Landscape in 1963.

He died in 1982, in Hawthorn from lung cancer at age 55.