in England. His first wife was Gunda Lambton (née von Davidson) a German artist and writer with whom he had two daughters. His second wife Dorothea (née Dessauer), formerly his children's nanny, was an Austrian Jewish artist whose affluent parents died in the Holocaust. He and Dorothea also had two daughters. A few years after their eventual divorce she died of a drug overdose. Williams met his third and fourth wives while living in Mexico. Four months after his second divorce in 1962, he married Alicia Rayas, his nineteen-year-old Mexican housekeeper. Several years later they had a son. His last marriage was to Leticia Vargas Arredondo, from a prominent family in Guanajuato. He and Leticia had a daughter together when he was sixty-six years old. His youngest daughter was 17 when Williams died. At 84 Williams died at his home in Marfil, and was buried in Aspen, Colorado. He had five daughters: Fiona and Bettina from his first marriage; Jessica and Estyn from his second; Dilys from his fourth; and a son, Dylan, from his third marriage. For the last 40 years of his life Williams divided most of his time between a restored hacienda in Guanajuato and in his home in San Antonio, Texas. Techniques In a 1980 interview, Williams described his approach to illustrating stories by other writers. His initial reading of the material usually would suggest thirty or forty potential pictures. "To compose the pictures is very hard ... I look for all the action in the story; then I arrange forms and color. I always try to imagine what the author is seeing. Of course, I have to narrow down my ideas to the number of drawings I'm allowed, which might be as few as ten per book. I make a list of illustrations. When I see a picture, I write down the idea and a page number while I read the manuscript." Williams drew few straight lines. He used charcoal and graphite pencils, from fine to very soft, to illustrate the Little House books. The "youngest" book in the series, Little House in the Big Woods, is nearly lamplit in its coziness, almost an echo of the small-animal sensibilities of The Fur Family or his deeply colored Little Golden Books. He used pen and ink for The Cricket in Times Square, the Rescuers books, Charlotte's Web, and Stuart Little. The Giant Golden Book of Elves