Adele Williams was born in Richmond, Virginia, an area known for its scenic landscapes. Though her career as a portrait, still life, and landscape painter took her to the Northern United States and to Europe, Richmond would remain a home base for her entire life. It has been suggested that her creative inclinations were nurtured by her grandfather, who was an inventor and draughtsman. The skills he passed to her may have contributed to her success at the local public schools, as she graduated first in her class at age fifteen. In 1886 she left for New York to study art at the Woman’s Art School of Cooper Union, where she won two medals and graduated in just three years. Classes at the Art Students League ensued, including lessons in watercolor with Rhonda Holmes Nicholls, and according to some sources, classes with William Merritt Chase.
In 1892 Williams went to Paris and took courses at the Académie Julian, favored by many Americans, especially women. Among them was Willie Betty Newman, who like Williams, studied there with the noted academic artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Gabriel Ferrier was another of Williams’s instructors, and evidently she prospered, as she won the Prix Concours medal and her work was shown at the Paris Salon. On her return to the States two years later, she became active in local art endeavors, specifically the Richmond Art Club where Adéle Clark and Nora Houston were very much involved. The club organized classes, exhibitions of members’ work, and brought in the work of noted Northern artists such as Ernest Lawson, Childe Hassam, and Elliott Daingerfield.
Williams furthered her art education at Old Lyme, Connecticut, known for attracting and nurturing American Impressionists. While there, she may have met aspiring painter Ellen Axson Wilson, first wife of Woodrow Wilson, whose portrait Williams painted in 1903. In addition, she went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Charles Hawthorne had founded the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899. In her fifties Williams traveled abroad numerous times in 1924, 1926, 1928, 1930, and again in 1937. Working in a fresh Impressionist manner, she depicted landscapes and local scenery, such as marketplaces and harbors, using both oil and watercolor.