16 Nov. 1860–11 Dec. 1905
The young boy early began to help his mother and sisters and plowed when he was hardly large and strong enough to "lift the plough around the end of the furrow." In his childhood he grew to love books and had as a teacher Miss Betty Craig, who fostered this love; she taught in a school held in the home of Dr. John McDowell on John's River. Afterwards he attended a Peabody school three miles from his home. Years later Randall was to paint a portrait of George Peabody, copied from a Mayall daguerreotype and now owned by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He continued to help the family and worked at odd jobs, farming, and brick making. At sixteen he entered the Table Rock Academy, opened by the Reverend Robert Logan Patton, who had recently returned from Amherst College. Patton encouraged young Will's talent for drawing and showed some of his work to Harvard geologists who were visiting Table Rock. They sent him the first art materials (paper and crayons) that he had ever owned. He worked in the yard and garden of the Patton home and made a picture of Winnie, the little daughter. Later (ca. 1890) he did a charcoal drawing of Mr. Patton. Randall was interested not only in art but also in history and, asking many questions, he continued to learn from Patton. When he was seventeen and eighteen, Will taught at a free school in Lincoln County at Lowesville.
Determined to go to the state university, he set out in the fall of 1880 to walk to Chapel Hill from the home of his sister, Elizabeth, who had married a Beck of Burke County. Two nights on the way were spent with people known to Robert Patton. At Chapel Hill he was fortunate in being interviewed by the university president, Kemp P. Battle, who, in a short sketch written on 16 Dec. 1906, recalled him as a "pale-faced slender figure, modest and unassuming, but with determination in every feature." His uncle became his surety; Deems Fund money, later repaid in full, was borrowed. The Dialectic Society paid him for being librarian, the first year a salary had been given. In the Southern Historical Collection is a notebook he kept, with many drawings and illustrations, for a zoology course under Frederick Williams Simonds. Randall, who was graduated with high standing in the class of 1884, was class prophet, and James Lee Love was president and valedictorian. Randall's graduating speech on "North Carolina Folk Lore," a "humorous and able disquisition," met with "unusual applause." Later, when the university's enemies were requesting state legislators to cut appropriations because they said it catered only to students of well-to-do families, Randall wrote a beautiful tribute to the university and to Battle. "President Battle made me feel quite at home and I felt as if he had been waiting for the opportunity to make me welcome. . . . I knew the moment I saw his face that I would get sympathy and encouragement. . . . If a young man fails to get along at the University it is his own fault. It is not a rich man's college—it is the poor boy's college: and that State cannot spend money in any other way that will make such large returns." Battle called him "one of the worthiest of all the graduates of the University."
In 1898 Randall built a home on the crest of the Blue Ridge at Blowing Rock. For his health his physician sent him to the Southwest, where he spent several months at Sante Fe, N.Mex., but was not helped and so returned to Blowing Rock. On the back of a photograph of his wife in the archives at Greensboro is the statement that she served "as Registrar, English teacher, supply clerk around 1900 and for some years. Her husband, who died of T.B. while she was here, was an artist. . . . His studio was in the attic of Administration." Randall died at Blowing Rock and his body was taken to Washington, D.C., for burial in Glenwood Cemetery, 2219 Lincoln Road, NE, Lot 302 of Section D. His grave site is 11 and that of his wife, who died at age sixty-eight on 17 Apr. 1918, is 12. Also on the lot are the graves of a stillborn infant and William George Randall, Jr., age three. Another child who died as an infant is listed by Patton.
Randall did some landscape and genre painting, but it was in portraiture that he excelled. In the archives at Greensboro is an undated newspaper clipping that aptly describes his color as "good, in the pictures of men rich and warm, in those of women tender and delicate, all that is natural and correct." According to Patton, there are more than one hundred of his paintings owned by various people. Cuthbert Lee lists twelve portraits and a replica. The North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources has listed fifteen portraits owned by the state, some in storage, some hanging in state buildings in Raleigh. Five of these are also listed in Lee. The University of North Carolina owns nine, but the attribution of the three Mason ladies is questionable. At the University of North Carolina at Greensboro are seven portraits of men, all signed by him. There are four of young ladies that look like his work, but his signature is not discernible. The Greensboro Public Library owns a portrait.
A portrait of Randall, painted by a French artist when he was studying abroad, was presented by his niece, the late Mrs. Nana Beck Daugherty, of Jacksonville, Fla., to Oak Hill School on the Table Rock Road, with which the small Table Rock School he attended was consolidated. An unveiling was held on 16 Nov. 1943 with a display of all of his work that could be found. All known relatives were invited and some participated in the program.