Willem den Ouden underwent his education in the 1950s at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, where he later, from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, served as a lecturer in figure drawing. In 1967, he relocated with his wife, the painter and watercolorist Ferry Alink (1937-2013), to Varik, a village on the Waal. He was one of the pioneers of the Foundation Friends of the Old Tower in Varik.
As Den Ouden was attached to the Waal landscape and the floodplains, he resisted the dike strengthening plans of Rijkswaterstaat between 1986 and 1995 in art festivals and media appearances, as he deemed them too drastic: in his eyes, the reinforcement of the Waal dike could have been executed with much more subtlety. Initially, he received a lot of support, but after the high water levels of 1995, the tide turned against him and he was threatened and even shot at. Since then, Den Ouden no longer painted directly along the river, but from the large balcony of the Veerhuis, the former residence and studio of his friend, artist Pieter Kooistra, which had a view of the Waal. The river in the distance, the clouds, and the sun became his main subjects. From 1999 onwards, he made drawings and paintings of the sky and the land every summer, which he then worked on into one or two large oil paintings in his studio during the winter. From 2011, due to his physical condition, he no longer worked in the landscape and focused solely on painting (self)portraits in his studio.
Den Ouden passed away in April 2025 at the age of 97.
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