Kit Williams

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Kit Williams is the author of Masquerade, a pictorial storybook which contained clues to the location of an 18 carat golden hare created by Williams and then buried "somewhere in Britain".

A modified version of the book also appeared in Italian, with a treasure buried in Italy.

Williams wrote another puzzle book; the puzzle was to figure out the title of the book and represent it without using the written word. This time the competition ran for just a year and a day and the winner was revealed on the live BBC TV chatshow Wogan.

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Art background

Excerpts from The Man of Masquerade by Susan Raven, June 20 1982, The Times:

"I became a painter because I was a painter," says Kit Williams. He was almost put off art at school; "but I always knew I could do it. And thinking visually was useful in physics, and I spent my time building television sets and sending up rockets. When I left school... my mother was so fed up she sent me off to join the Navy."

Kit started painting on board the aircraft carrier Victorious. To keep steady when the ship was moving, he used to tie down the canvas, and the seat he was sitting on; he even tied his arm to an armrest. "They thought I was very strange, but my divisional officer somehow understood. He gave me a tiny compartment to paint in."

Leaving the Navy, Kit toured the British coast in a caravan for nearly a decade, taking less and less demanding jobs so that he had the energy to paint and to think. He discovered English painters like Blake and Samuel Palmer and Stanley Spencer: "I felt related to them, I identified with them." Today, he says "Botticelli is my man." One can see traces of all of them in his obsessed and haunting canvases.

In Whitstable, Kit used to collect driftwood on the shore and make little boats with his address inside, and push them out to sea, hoping to get replies from half way across the world. "In the end, somebody in England picked one up and wrote to me — a young man about to go to Cambridge University. It was he who brought me an entrance form for the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool."

Kit submitted an intimate little picture of two people and a Morris Minor parked on a river bank. It became one of the 80 selected for the exhibition and was immediately bought by one of the Moores family.

The Portal Gallery in London saw this Liverpool picture and asked him if they could show his work. And it was after their second Kit Williams exhibition, in 1976, that publisher Tom Maschler asked him to do a children's book... and that was when Masquerade was conceived.

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Select bibliography

Kit Williams, Masquerade, J. Cape, 1979 ( ISBN 080523747X )
Kit Williams, Masquerade: The Complete Book with the Answer Explained , J. Cape, 1982 [paperback] ( ISBN 0894803697 )
Kit Williams, The Bee on the Comb, Knopf, 1984 ( ISBN 039453817X )
Kit Williams, Out of One Eye: The Art of Kit Williams, Crown, 1986 ( ISBN 0517564319 )
Kit Williams, Engines of Ingenuity, Gingko Press, 2001 ( ISBN 1584231068 )