Kitaj was a literary artist. He read widely and his art was informed by ideas discovered in print. His astute, often witty combination of words and images demonstrated an ability to manipulate symbols to create fine shades of meaning. He stated in 1964: ‘A TITLE is only one example of an association between a painting and word-matter …… a title may be uttered in a place many thousands of miles from the work it belongs to and yet the viability of the association cannot be denied.’ In the case of Welcome Every Dread Delight, the title came from ‘Cynthio’ by the English pre-Romantic poet Edward Young (1683–1765):

"I Hate the Spring, I turn away
From gaudy Scenes of flow’ry May,
The vocal Grove, the painted Mead,
The lucid Brook, the quiv’ring Shade,
Where Mirth, and Love, (Phantastik Pair!)
Laugh at the clouded Brow of Care.
The Death of Nature, the severe
And wintry Waste, to me more dear.
Yes, welcome Darkness! welcome Night!
Thrice welcome every dread Delight!"

Welcome Every Dread Delight was shown in Kitaj’s first solo exhibition in 1963, and the catalogue included the following ‘commentary’ about the painting, in which no reference was made to Young’s poem:

"The (man) holding his leg is a version of Sciapod, a classical monster figuring in Marvels of the East by Rudolf Wittkower (Journal of the Warburg Institute V 1942)"

The relevant illustration in Wittkower’s article was a thirteenth-century bas-relief in the west portal of Sens Cathedral. The sciapodes, Wittkower wrote, were ‘a people with a single large foot on which they move with great speed and which they also use as a sort of umbrella against the burning sun’. In 1963, the Burlington Magazine’s critic spurned Kitaj’s catalogue and described it as being ‘of very little real help’: the artist’s source imagery was deemed relevant only insofar as it was a necessary ingredient in the making of such animated, unfamiliar pictures.

Some areas of the picture surface in Welcome Every Dread Delight are textured with collaged scraps of paper. The woman’s face is pasted with an uneven square of marbled paper. The picture space is regulated by vertical planks on the back wall and a solid brown door, cropped at the left-hand side and seeming to hang off its hinges. Having established a regular domestic interior, Kitaj deconstructed it with exacting painterly interventions and a disturbing cast. The blond woman in a green dress ignores the pink sciapod to her right. This jarring cacophony of pictorial and painterly terms illuminates one of the Seven Types of Ambiguity described by William Empson, whose book Kitaj read at Oxford a few years earlier: ‘An ambiguity of the fourth type occurs when two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state of mind in the author.’

Kitaj continued working on the painting after it had been photographed for his 1963 exhibition catalogue. The reproduction in the catalogue shows a soft-edged ‘X’ shape floating above the woman’s head, which was later painted out and replaced by a foreshortened rectangle, painted in a red outline, and stripes of painterly colour situated along the back wall. This degree of indeterminacy in Kitaj’s paintings reflected another of Empson’s ambiguities, which occurred ‘when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing, or not holding it all in his mind at once’. Empson’s analysis sanctioned Kitaj to perform this kind of reworking with impunity, and he continued doing so for most of his career.