Personal Life
Williams was born in Llangefni, Anglesey into an old landed Anglesey family, and was educated at Moreton Hall School then Shrewsbury School before joining the 6th Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers as a lieutenant in 1937. After he failed a British Army medical examination in 1941 (because of epilepsy), his doctor advised him to take up art for the sake of his health.
Despite academic difficulties, Williams enrolled at London's Slade School of Fine Art in 1941 and taught art at Highgate School, London, where he was senior art master from 1944 until 1973. His pupils included the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, Royal Academicians Anthony Green and Patrick Procktor and composers John Tavener and John Rutter. In 1968 he won a scholarship (Winston Churchill Fellowship) to study and paint in Y Wladfa; the Welsh settlement in Patagonia.
Williams died on 1 September 2006, aged 88, at a nursing home in Anglesey after a long battle with cancer, and is buried at St Mary's Church, Llanfair-yng-Nghornwy. Paying tribute to Williams after his death, bass-baritone singer and Williams collector Bryn Terfel said, "I'm deeply saddened by the passing of Wales's foremost ambassador in the visual arts. Long may his memory live on in the legacy of his numerous, wonderful paintings."
Later in 2006, the Welsh singer and Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfield included a track called "Which Way to Kyffin", dedicated to Williams, on his album The Great Western.
Read more about this topic: Kyffin Williams
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“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)