We have already featured one Renate Meyer wordless picturebook on this site: Vicki (1968). Its sequel, Hide-and-Seek, was published in the following year, also by The Bodley Head.

Together, the two books make an interesting pair, as Meyer had a distinctive style. She created her illustrations using a mix of mediums and techniques, including oils, water-colour, papier-mâché, paper, collage with threads, textiles and found materials, sometimes painting directly on to plastics and glass.

This story portrays two children playing a game of Hide-and-Seek, and the book is a game in itself, as readers try to spot the kids hidden within the pages.

It opens with a little girl, dressed in vivid red, hiding her eyes and presumably counting to 10. The setting is a lush green space with sunlight filtering through the trees.

We do not see the person the girl is seeking until the third spread, and even then we only get a glimpse of him. It is a little boy, dressed in an equally vivid blue. In the picture above he is just visible through the tangle of trees on the left of the righthand spread.

The boy runs out of the trees, under some washing hanging on a line, through a flower garden and eventually into the house. The girl follows him, but walks right past where he is hiding indoors behind a curtain. Young readers are likely to enjoy spotting him, even though the girl herself doesn’t!

The game continues as the girl searches in a bed, under a table and then in the garden once more.

Until now the reader has seen only the children, but towards the end of the book we see an adult, most likely a parent, sitting indoors with a cup in hand, looking out on the young ones with a watchful eye. This picture demonstrates the way Meyer often layers her images. Here the foreground shows the person at the table, the mid-ground a horizontal row of Venetian-blind slats, and the background a spacious outdoor garden. This layering technique gives Meyer’s images great depth, which is probably easier to see on the page than online.

The game ends with the girl finally catching the boy, shown in a lively blur of red and blue against the green-brown trees.

Renate Meyer (1930-2014) was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. After the rise of the Nazi party in 1933, her family relocated to the UK and became naturalised British citizens in 1938.

Meyer studied art at the Regent Street Polytechnic where, in 1949, she met her future husband Charles Keeping (1924-1988). They married in 1952. Charles was a fellow illustrator whose prolific body of work included wordless picturebooks, such as Inter-City and River.