William Evans was known both as Evans of Bristol and as Welsh Evans to distinguish him from William Evans of Eton. He was probably born in Bristol and spent most of his early life there. He was taught drawing in Bristol by Francis Danby (c.1824–c.1826) and between 1827 and 1832 was himself giving drawing lessons in Clifton. In 1832–3 he was a member of a sketching club in Bristol whose members also included W. J. Müller (1812-1845), J. S. Prout (1806-1876) and Samuel Jackson (1794-1869). He seems to have visited Wales early on, perhaps in the company of his sketching club associates, as there is a drawing, Chepstow Old Toll Gate, dated 1834 in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. He certainly toured with Müller, who seems to have been his closest companion, in 1842. The View of Snowdon (Bristol Museum and Art Gallery) is dated 1843, suggesting that by this time North Wales provided the main focus for his work. From about 1844 Evans lodged at Tŷ'n-y-cae, a cottage near the Fairy Glen at Betws-y-Coed in the Conwy valley, and thereby became one of the first resident painters of the artists' colony popularized by David Cox (1783-1859), whose annual summer visits to the village commenced in that year. He certainly lived in poverty and dire conditions at Tŷ'n-y-cae, but produced some of the most lyrical landscape watercolours of the period there, as open and fluid as the later works of Cox, along with studies of domestic interiors and of the local people, and the View of the falls at Machno, Bettws-y-Coed and the Cottage Interior were probably executed during this period.
In 1845 he was elected an Associate of the Old Water Colour Society, where he was held in high regard, exhibiting there from 1845 to 1859 and thereafter spent more time in London. On account of his declining health he travelled to the Rhine and Italy in 1852, spending the winter successively at Genoa, Rome, and Naples. He died at 143 Marylebone Road, London, on 8 December 1858, the cause of death given as asthma. The three works in this collection display the technical dexterity of Evans with the paper support being well worked using techniques as scratching out, scraping and soaking to add variety to his watercolours.