Kit Williams: English Magical Realist

Williams's iconic picture book Masquerade is the quintessential blend of modern and ancient

Masquerade was a unique venture when it appeared. It was a large-format hardback picture book with less than 4,000 words of text but 16 sumptuous full-page illustrations that presented the adventures of Jack Hare during the few days around a lunar eclipse. He races in order to recover a jewel he had to deliver from the moon to the sun. The hare’s adventures in the human world saw him exposed to danger and using his instincts to save himself. The images incorporate writing which is part fable, part fairy story and part puzzle. Cover blurb informed readers that a Golden Hare (made of precious metals and jewels) had been buried at a secret location and that clues to the location were contained in the book and the first person to decode those would be allowed to keep the hare. The accompanying photograph showed the dazzling and delicate Golden Hare laid on dark loam.   

The art was beautiful, the story was compelling, the iconography was rooted in the familiarly English, the prize was unique and valuable; Masquerade became a publishing sensation, with almost one million copies sold worldwide within one year. There was widespread coverage in newspapers, radio and television. A nation of crossword solvers had the ultimate problem upon which to concentrate. Masquerade’s story, art and planning took many years, as witnessed by the archive, which was later auctioned for £17,500.

[Kit Williams, Masquerade (1979). © The artist.]

In 1979 I was six years old, too young to decipher the clues, but I was alert enough to drink in the sumptuous paintings. They became imprinted on my memory, particularly the dandelion woman floating above a suburban view, the eclipse of the moon, with the inverted moon woman mingled with snakes and insects and another of a hare jelly on a dish. The characters, based on close observation of real models, occupied the uneasy territory of being homely with undertones of oddity and threat. The limpid style, cool coloration, playful wit and fastidious hyperrealist detail made a huge impression on me. Although none of this came through in my own art – I was much more taken by looser painting of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries when I came to work on my own pictures – I never lost my admiration for Williams’s style, which is best classed as Magical Realism.

[Kit Williams, Masquerade (1979). © The artist]

The story of how the Golden Hare was won is a sad tale. Rather than a clever student decoding the puzzles and tracking down the location, which was what Williams expected, an acquaintance of an ex-girlfriend of Williams secretly pieced together inside information to identify a rough location of the Golden Hare in 1982. Using a fake name, this associate submitted his guess to the author, who confirmed the correctness. Critically, it did not include an explanation or reasoning, just the approximate location. A pair of readers soon afterwards submitted a correct answer including their workings, but too late. The prize had already been awarded and the jewelled hare disappeared from view until it was offered at auction, when it sold for £31,000. Williams was reunited for the first time with the Golden Hare in 2019.

The scrupulous attention to detail in the puzzles of the book echo the elaborateness of his art, which includes unique frames using marquetry and trompe-l’oeil designs. The paintings themselves are built up gradually in colour glazes in the Old Master technique. To this day, Williams continues to paint and design intricate and intriguing art, which can be seen on the website he shares with jeweller Eleyne Williams: https://kitwilliams.co.uk/

[Kit Williams, Masquerade (1979). © The artist.]

The landscapes of Williams are those of southern England, most particularly the mild hills and copses of his native Kent, often lit by the moon. The characters in his paintings seem essentially English. In Masquerade there is a painting of a woman as a dandelion, floating over a village that anyone could identify as typically English. One of the reasons Williams is so beloved is because he is one of the quintessential English artists of the 1970s and 1980s. He is part of the wave of British artists influenced by photorealism in the 1970s and is the unacknowledged counterpart of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, an artistic collective (of the 1970s) which espoused a return to living, and depicting, the English countryside. In other words, he is a modern artist living in today’s world but negotiating a way of recording and celebrating what is enchanting about his country that blends ancient and contemporary. The ancient archetypes of the huntress, fortune-teller, changeling and witch recur in Williams’s later paintings.

[Kit Williams, Fluke (2023), oil on canvas. © The artist]

There is deep familiarity to Williams’s art of Masquerade and later. Its imagery is uniquely English, its technique is traditional, its sensibility is a fusion of modern and ancient. The eldritch shadow of the Green Man and the succubus – as well as the nervous energy of the hare or the magpie -  are never far removed from his scenes, no matter how carefree or playful his characters appear. The bather is never so far from drowning and the placid field is not forever preserved from the thornbush. These views are the natural descendants of Paul Nash’s Sussex hills lit by sun and moon.

We so easily inhabit Williams’s paintings because they are our world, at least to those of who grew up in the cultivated downlands of southern England. That is perhaps what most captivated me when I first saw Masquerade: the world and people I knew fixed in paint. It something that caught my attention and when I see familiar countryside, Williams’s images are never far distant from my thoughts.