• Was an English portrait and genre painter.
• He became known as "William" when he started signing his works as "W. Peters".
• Peters was born in Freshwater, Isle of Wight, the son of Matthew Peters.
• Peters received his artistic training from Robert West in Dublin.
• In 1756 and 1758 he received prizes from the first School of Design in Dublin.
• In 1759, he was sent by the Dublin Society to London to become a student of Thomas Hudson and won a premium from the Society of Arts.
• The group also paid for him to travel to Italy to study art from 1761 to 1765.
• On 23 September 1762 he was elected to the Accademia del Disegno in Florence.
• Peters returned to England in 1765 and exhibited works at the Society of Artists from 1766 to 1769.
• Beginning in 1769, Peters exhibited works at the Royal Academy. • In 1771 he was elected an associate and in 1777 an academician. • He returned to Italy in 1771 and stayed until 1775.
• He also probably traveled to Paris in 1783–84, where he met Léopold Boilly, Antoine Vestier, and was influenced by the work of Jean-Baptiste Greuze.
• On 27 February 1769, Peters became a freemason, and he was made the grand portrait painter of the Freemasons and the first provincial grand master of Lincolnshire in 1792.
• He painted five Shakespearean works for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery and six for the Irish Shakespeare Gallery.
• He charged 80 guineas for painting full-length portraits.
On 28 April 1790 he and Margaret Susannah Knowsley were married; the couple had five children.
• Peters died in Kent on 20 March 1814.
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