“While other lesser painters flounced, emoted, took to drink or drugs, gained and lost names for themselves, and drifted in and out of group cultural awareness, Evelyn Williams worked steadily on, following her own vision, her own artistic intelligence, unmoved by fashion. The result is a body of work, imbued with an unmistakable mixture of grace and greatness.”

“Evelyn Williams is startlingly modern. Mortality, identity, alienation, all the issues so beloved of the Young British Artists, are addressed in her work in completely original ways.”

“The art world half a century ago, when Evelyn Williams began her career, was a macho preserve. Since then there has been a successful feminist revolution, at least in the arts, and the situation has reversed. In art schools female students outnumber the male. Women artists, like Evelyn, who managed to establish themselves before the sea-change, are heroic pioneers. She has blazed a trail in the most universal subject of all, human relationships— en masse, in groups, families, couples or concentrating solitude. She has done this with the vision of a poet and the empathy of a wife, mother and grandmother. The result, as subtle in technique as it is profound in feeling and visionary in scope, has no equivalent.”

“Her work deserves to be as well-known as those of her fellow 1961 John Moores prize-winners, Blake, Blow, Hockney, Kitaj, Kossoff, McWilliam and Uglow.”