Working as a portrait artist principally in New Jersey, Micah Williams created early in his career likenesses of area residents. His birthplace is not confirmed but it is thought he was born about 1782 near Hempstead, New York.

In the spring of 1815, he, a former plater of silver, was released from the Middlesex County jail in Brunswick, New Jersey, having been jailed during that year as an insolvent debtor. For the next twenty years, he would manage to support himself and family as an itinerant painter of pastel portraits.

The first published reference to him was in the New Brunswick Advertiser in December 1806, when he married Margaret Priestly. Soon after that he and his brother-in-law, James Applegate P...