C Wood lists a Henry Williams, who exhibited two landscapes in 1874, when the artist would have been 17, from an address in Penzance, Cornwall. 

A local gallery owner has found a coastal painting by Henry John Williams (2012) with 'Penzance exhibition, 1875' written on the obverse side and signed. This may have been entered in the Annual Exhibitions held for the Penzance School of Art classes by Henry GEOFFROI at the school rooms in Voundervour Lane, off of Chapel Street, Penzance.

In 1876, a painting entitled On the Coast, South Devon, A Calm Evening, by Harry J Williams was exhibited at the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society (RCPS) in Falmouth, in the Professional Artists section of the Art Union of Cornwall annual exhibition. J & G give exhibition dates for him (as H J Williams) only as 1885-86, in that he exhibited in Cheshire in 1885, and then in Truro, Cornwall the following year. He spent much of the 1880s living in Polperro. Several of his Polperro paintings were exhibited in Devonport, and also at Plymouth Arts Club.

The 1891 Census lists the artist as the 37 year old single nephew of Elizabeth Rendle, the widowed head of household living at 58 Morrab Road, Penzance and specifies that his specialty is landscape art. In 1892 he married a widow, Elizabeth Emma Stevens, who had been born in Phillack. He died prematurely aged just 47, in 1901.