© The Editors, The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 1 2004. All rights reserved

Painting the Sublime in Visible Syntax: Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound

Sarah Fulford

he fell in love with art,and life began.1

SINCE THE PUBLICATION of Another Life in 1973, Derek Walcott has shownheightened interest in the interplay between poetry, the visual, and thevisionary. The relation between painting and poetry in his work has conse-quently been explored by a number of critics, including Edward Baugh,who wrote the excellent essay ‘Painters and Painting in Another Life’ (1973),Robert Bensen, who discusses painting and poetry in Midsummer (1984), andWalcott’s sponsor, the Trinidadian arts commentator Clara de Rosa Lima,who has considered the importance of Van Gogh in Walcott’s work. Thisarticle will build on their observations about painters and painting in Walcott’searly poetry by considering his more recent publication, Tiepolo’s Hound (2000).2

The exploration of European art in Tiepolo’s Hound would seem at first topresage a classic anti-colonialist stance. However, Walcott does not seek topolarise the relation between coloniser and colonised but rather to prob-lematise it. Of course, this is seen even as early as 1962 when his famouspoem ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ asks how to choose, ‘Between this Africa andthe English tongue I love?’3 By Tiepolo’s Hound this is no longer a live question,

1 Derek Walcott, Another Life and Midsummer, in Collected Poems 1948–1984(London 1992). All further references are to this edition (AL or MS ) and are given inparentheses in the text.

2 Tiepolo’s Hound (London 2000); all further references are to this edition (TH )and are given in parentheses in the text. See Edward Baugh, ‘Painters and Paintingin Another Life’, in Robert Hamner (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott (London1997) pp. 239–50; Robert Bensen, ‘The Painter as Poet: Derek Walcott’s Midsummer’,ibid., pp. 336–47; Clara de Rosa Lima, ‘Walcott: Painting and the Shadow of VanGogh’, in Stewart Brown (ed.), The Art of Derek Walcott (Glamorgan 1991) pp. 171–93.

3 ‘A Far Cry from Africa’, from In A Green Night (1962), in Collected Poems 1948–1984, p. 18.

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as Walcott claims European culture as his own and undermines notions ofethnic purity that are central to nationalist writing. As a poet who is partlyAfrican, Dutch, and English, Walcott investigates the points of intersectionbetween European and Caribbean cultures in a creative celebration of thebifocal perspective that is alluded to in his essay ‘What the Twilight Says’(1998).4

This has led to the accusation that Walcott has sold out to Europeaninfluences or that he has forgotten to be angry about the wrongs of colonialhistory.5 On the surface, the form of Tiepolo’s Hound appears to be traditionallyEnglish as it is written in couplets of iambic pentameter that can be arrangedinto quatrains. Walcott’s insistence on such a tight poetic form conveys hisinterest in the limitations of language as well as demonstrating his belief inits ability to touch the visionary. The style is dense, sentences are elaborate,and the diction is often arcane.6 But the conventional form, implying anaccommodation with tradition, is offset by Walcott’s use of the visual arts ashe explores the ways in which the different media of poetry and paintingare able to communicate and to represent. As the poetic speaker in Tiepolo’s

Hound asserts, ‘He was Art’s subject as much as any empire’s’ (TH 29).While the poem refuses to view art as achieving transcendence from acolonial history, it does suggest that art enables the transformation of thegiven. This can be clarified if we consider Walcott’s early interest in thevisual arts.

In 1950 Walcott’s painting was first exhibited at the Temporary EducationOffice in St Lucia, where his Tribute to Braque was shown alongside the workof his friend, Dunstan St Omer. The exhibition was reviewed by HaroldSimmons (their mentor), in the Voice of St. Lucia.7 Harry Simmonds was afriend of Walcott’s father and he allowed St Omer and Walcott to use hisstudio, a converted morgue on St Barnard’s Hill, as a place in which topaint.8 Walcott’s paintings have also appeared on the covers of his pub-lished poetry, and as publicity for his plays which are accompanied bydrawings of the characters.9 His watercolours have since been exhibited in

4 ‘What the Twilight Says’, in What the Twilight Says: Essays (London 1998) p. 16. 5 John Kinsella, ‘Doubting Derek’, Observer, Sunday, 10 Sept. 2000. 6 Edward McCrorie, ‘The Great and the Near Great: The Current Status of

Poetry in America and Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound’, Providence: Studies in WesternCivilisation, 5/3–4 (2000), pp. 143–61: 153.

7 Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford 2000) p. 78. 8 De Rosa Lima, ‘Painting and the Shadow of Van Gogh’, p. 173. 9 Cf. King, A Caribbean Life, Walcott’s cover for First and Last Poems by Hunter

Francois (1950), his posters and flyers for Dream on Monkey Mountain (Trinidad 1974),The Charlatan (Trinidad 1974), O Babylon! (Trinidad 1976), the storyboard for Ti-Jeanand his Brothers, an unproduced film (1976), and drawings and a poster for MarieLaveau (1978–80) pp. 368–9.

TIEPOLO’S HOUND 13

the West Indies in 1986, at the Artsibit Gallery in Castries in 1988, and,more recently, at an exhibition entitled ‘Island Light: Watercolor and OilPaintings by Derek Walcott and Donald Hinkson’. Here, Walcott exhibiteda ‘Story Board and Text from Omeros’ and indicated his admiration for theAmerican watercolourist, Winslow Homer, whose work is notable for itssensitivity to light.10 In November 1997 Walcott exhibited a number of thepaintings he included in Tiepolo’s Hound as part of ‘The Dual Muse: TheWriter as Artist, the Artist as Writer’, and he read from the poem as a wayof introducing his paintings to the audience.11

In spite of his dedication to the visual arts, Walcott has discounted thevalue of his painting, which is often luminous but rather wooden. In anEnglish television interview with Melvyn Bragg for the South Bank Show in1988, Walcott comments: ‘although I can paint pretty competent water-colours, I just don’t have that bursting confidence of someone, you know,sloshing the paint around . . . I just don’t slosh, I pull . . . It’s all very Method-ist.’12 Walcott acknowledges that, while he may be a professional poet, hepaints as an amateur, he dabs rather than sloshes. This is recognised inBook Four of his autobiographical poem Another Life, when the poet realisespainting will not be his main vocation, as it is for his friend St Omer(a.k.a. Gregorias):

. . . I lived in a different gift, its element metaphor, while Gregorias would draw with the linear elation of an eel

(AL 200)

Walcott’s essay ‘Leaving School’, remembers the early influence of hisfather, Warwick Walcott, a keen painter, who died in his thirties whenDerek and his twin brother Roderick were little more than a year old.13

Walcott describes his home life:

On the walls of the drawing room were a copy of Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’,a romantic original of sea-birds and pluming breakers, he called ‘Ridersof the Storm’, a minature oil painting of mother, a self portrait inwatercolour and an avenue of pale coconut palms . . . I felt my father’swork, however minor, was unfinished . . . I treasured the books he used;

10 Review of ‘Island Light’ by Gail Levin and John B. Van Sickle at <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classics/jvsickle/clwalhin/htm>

11 Baugh, ‘Painters and Painting’, pp. 608–9. 12 Cf. de Rosa Lima, ‘Painting and the Shadow of Van Gogh’. 13 Ibid., p. 173.

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two small blue covered volumes on The Topographical Draughtsman andon Albrecht Dürer.14

Tiepolo’s Hound intends to continue where his father left off and Walcottindicates his interest in his part-English father’s predecessors, who arefound in his book of ‘The English Topographical Draughtsmen’ (TH 11). Thisincludes watercolourists from the eighteenth-century British landscapetradition and the Norwich school (Girtin, Sandby, and Cotman), who arenotable for their use of translucence. There is also a debt to Thomas Craven’s1939 edition of A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the Present

Day, from which he copied, in watercolour, a number of paintings, includingTurner’s (1775–1851) The Fighting Téméraire, remarkable both for its strikinglight and anticipation of French Impressionism.15 Walcott has been heavilyinfluenced by European art, and many of the paintings mentioned inTiepolo’s Hound are included in Craven’s Treasury, which becomes a museumfor the poet/art historian (AL 220).

Walcott tends to paint as a way of exploring issues that find a way intohis poetry, and vice versa. In Midsummer there is a poem about Paul Gauguin(1848–1903), whose portrait of Camille Pissarro is referred to in Tiepolo’s

Hound (TH 107) and who appears in the poem as ‘our Creole painter’ (TH 16),after his visit to Martinique. Carla de Rosa Lima explains how Walcott firstpainted a watercolour, The Death of Gauguin, in 1985, and meant to repaint itin oils, as part of a series of pictures on the lives of the Impressionists, butfailed to complete the project.16 Tiepolo’s Hound can be seen as an alter-native project, after Walcott signed a contract with Farrar, Straus & Girouxfor a book of about a hundred of his paintings and drawings which Walcottsaid he would introduce with a ten-page essay.17 This later became Tiepolo’s

Hound, where the life of the French pointillist Camille Pissarro is unravelledalongside the lives of other Impressionists, including Monet and those ofthe Barbizon school.

Pissarro initially appears in Another Life where the St Lucian hills are seen‘stippled with violet | as if they had seen Pissarro’ (AL 216). The world isseen as a copy of a painting: art, rather than the world, is the authenticoriginal. Walking around the district of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in

14 Walcott, ‘Leaving School’, The London Magazine, 15/6 (Sept. 1965) pp. 4–14.Cf. de Rosa Lima, ‘Painting and the Shadow of Van Gogh’, p. 173.

15 Thomas Craven, A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the PresentDay (New York 1939). This is referred to as ‘my old TREASURY OF ART MASTER-PIECES’ (TH 117). Cf. Walcott, Another Life MS, Library of the University of the WestIndies, Jamaica, p. 59, and Baugh, ‘Painters and Painting’, p. 240.

16 De Rosa Lima, ‘Painting and the Shadow of Van Gogh’, p. 188. 17 King, A Caribbean Life, p. 598.

TIEPOLO’S HOUND 15

New York, life imitates art as the speaker walks ‘down avenues hazy asImpressionist clichés’.18 Spending time in New York in the late 1950s,Walcott became interested in the New York school, and in particular in thework of the poet Frank O’Hara, to whom he dedicated the poem ‘SpringStreet in ’58’.19 At the New York Met the poetic speaker of Tiepolo’s Hound

first sees the elusive hound in a detail from a Venetian painting: ‘a slash ofpink on the inner thigh | of a white hound’ (TH 7). Walcott may well haveseen this at a Tiepolo exhibition at the Met in 1997.20 Later, the poet longsto rediscover the hound but cannot. The poem traces the journey of twomen on quests: the poet travelling through Europe in search of the houndand Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew, who leaves his native St Thomas in theCaribbean to study art in Paris. But why use Camille Pissarro, and why thefascination with the lost hound?

As a Portuguese Jew living in the once Danish but later French andCatholic St Thomas, Pissarro is a hybrid outsider within Caribbean culture,and this is even more the case when he arrives in Paris. His figure is used bya poet of mixed ethnic origin who grew up as a Methodist in a predom-inantly Catholic community in order to explore matters of ethnicity, faith,and exile. In Book One, Pissarro contemplates leaving Charlotte Amalie, andas he walks through the fishing village ‘balancing both worlds’ there is thequestion, ‘In which should he remain?’ Pissarro is seen as a pair of humanscales, divided between cultures, with his native landscape addressing himin a West Indian tongue: ‘We know you going. | We is your roots. Withoutus you weak’ (TH 25). He carries with him the self-doubt of any artist butalso a lack of confidence in his identity, ‘what was he but a backward, colon-ised Jew?’ (TH 60). Turning from St Thomas to Paris, there is a lurkingguilt at leaving the island (TH 80–2). ‘Transparent as a ghost’, Pissarroendures ‘the pain of being provincial’ which is a ‘scab’ or ‘badge’ like theyellow star worn by the Jews of Europe under Nazi occupation.

Amid the Franco-Prussian war and the French anti-semitism of theDreyfus case, Pissarro moves to London with Monet. We see the way inwhich France hypocritically promotes republican values with its celebrationof Bastille Day (TH 104) but remains imperialist in its policies towards thecolonies, and towards the Jews, who are marginalised within French culture.

18 Walcott, ‘Piano Practice’, from The Fortunate Traveller (1981), in Collected Poems1948–1984, p. 403. Cf. de Rosa Lima, ‘Painting and the Shadow of Van Gogh’,p. 184.

19 First published as ‘Reveries of Spring Street’ and revised for Sea Grapes (1976).Cf. King, A Caribbean Life, p. 153.

20 ‘Giambattista Tiepolo’ at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, 24 Jan.–27Apr. 1997. See the exhibition catalogue, Giambattista Tiepolo, ed. Keith Christiansen(New York 1996) picture 16a (p. 129).

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When Dreyfus is condemned, Pissarro ‘cease[s] being a Frenchman, a Jew’and sees all of his French landscapes as ‘forgeries’, as in

the way that Dreyfus copies his own script

with false mistakes, strokes that were subtle lies,keeping those errors where his brush had slipped

to make a sworn treachery of Art as Dreyfus had of service.

(TH 102)

Dreyfus is sent to Devil’s Island in the Caribbean, where he dies free fromEuropean gloom ‘in sea and sunshine, luckier than most men’ (TH 105).Paradoxically, the Caribbean becomes ‘his own paradise’ away from the hellof Europe with its ‘smoke wreath from the ovens’ (TH 105) of the Holocaust.

As the poet/painter regards German paintings, he realises that

Their history, their light are not for you. Their autumn blazes with the astonishment

of dispossession, if you were a Jew, and wore the yellow leaf of banishment.

(TH 106)

Here we see another light from which Pissarro is banished. While the partlyDutch poet may admire the light of Bruegel and the Flemish masters, the‘cool October, under a pink sky’ is part of a European sunrise and history fromwhich he is alienated like a ‘homeless dog’ (TH 46) or Caribbean stray.

Back in Europe, bearing the ‘weight of history’s shadow’ (TH 36),Pissarro is not only dispossessed from the colonial culture but constantlyseeing double, and this is indicated by the use of light within the poem. InAnother Life, the poet and Gregorias are ‘orphans of the nineteenth century’living ‘by another light’ or the fading light of empire, ‘Victoria’s orphans,bats in the banyan boughs’ (AL 219). In Tiepolo’s Hound, the poet finds him-self filling the place of Pissarro ‘in nineteenth-century St. Thomas | mybody filled his pencilled silhouette’ (TH 137). In Another Life the Caribbeanartists try to capture the light and life that is particular to the Caribbean butfind themselves ‘in those long pastoral twilights after the war’ (AL 219) asthey are held in thrall by the Old Masters.

Likewise, in Tiepolo’s Hound the Caribbean light is considered in terms ofthe Italian light of Tiepolo sunsets (TH 7) so that the West Indian light isunderstood in terms of the European. But once in Europe, Pissarro awakensin Paris and rises to draw the curtains to find light but ‘a grey light’, the‘Island vanished’ (TH 33). Here, the leaden Parisian light is markedlydifferent from that of the island. Nevertheless, Pissarro still believes he

TIEPOLO’S HOUND 17

hears the noises of his island or the breaking surf in the hiss of the rain inthe street below (TH 33). The light in the poem is constantly shifting, withthe effect that European and Caribbean perspectives are both held apartand merged together. As Walcott suggests in his essay ‘What the TwilightSays’, ‘the noblest are those who are trapped, who have accepted thetwilight’, an in-between light that is neither one thing nor the other.21 Thetwilight becomes a symbol for the dual Caribbean and European visionthat is offered to us throughout Tiepolo’s Hound.

When Pissarro visits the Louvre, it seems that European painting has notangible connection with the experience of the Caribbean, but in a ‘his-torical sense, the changes in European society that these paintings record,reflect and bear directly on the facts of life in the Caribbean’:22

There are no Negroes in the pantheon of bleached albino marbles that were painted

with the garish taste of an Asiatic sun, but in generous frescoes he grows acquainted

with hounds and turbanned Moors at the edge of a feast.

(TH 37)

The speaker is looking at Paolo Veronese’s (1528–88) The Feast in the House

of Levi (1573), from the Venice Academy where Moors serve Europeansamid the white marble columns.23

The Feast in the House of Levi was originally entitled Christ in the House of

Levi,24 but the Inquisition condemned the depiction of Moorish servantsand the irreverent placement of a piebald canine at the front centre of The

Last Supper (TH 122). They ordered the mutt to be replaced by MaryMagdalene, but Veronese simply changed the title of the painting. Walcotthas also experienced Catholic censorship and so it is not surprising that thispainting should interest him. The poetic speaker of Tiepolo’s Hound is drawnto the aesthetics of Catholicism and, in particular, to Italian Renaissanceart. Rather than dismissing it simply as a part of the oppressor’s culture, in

21 Walcott, ‘What the Twilight Says’, p. 5. 22 De Rosa Lima, ‘Painting and the Shadow of Van Gogh’, p. 182. 23 Cf. David Dabydeen, A Harlot’s Progress: Blacks in British Art (London 1999), and

‘Turner’ (1993), a poem by Dabydeen inspired by J. M. W. Turner’s painting SlaversThrowing Overboard the Dead and Dying, in Turner: New and Selected Poems (2002).Dabydeen would surely approve of Walcott’s use of this painting to indicate theEuropean representation of North Africans which ‘Turner’ refers to as ‘this thingdrawn yet | Struggling to break free’.

24 Craven, A Treasury of Art Masterpieces, p. 179. Andreas Priever, Paolo Caliari,dit Veronese 1528–1588 (Cologne 2000) pp. 108–9.

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Another Life Walcott compares Gregorias’s sensibility with that of Raphaeland imagines the spirit of the Renaissance has found its way to theCaribbean where there is a contemporary artistic awakening (AL 186).

In Book Four the poet, in search of the hound, visits Venice and admiresTiepolo’s (1696–1770) Apelles Painting Campaspe (c.1720).25 Here, there is nohound but

. . . a white lapdog revels in the wealth

of Venetian light. Alexander sprawls in a chair. An admiring African peers from the canvas’s edge

where a bare-shouldered model, Campaspe with gold hair, sees her myth evolve. The Moor silent with privilege. . . .

we presume from the African’s posture that I too am learning both skill and conversion watching from the painting’s side.

(TH 129)26

Tiepolo’s painting of Campaspe was an act of self-homage, as she isdepicted with the face of his wife. Walcott’s reference to the painting alsorisks self-allegory as we presume that he sees himself in the African’sposture. The Moor’s silence indicates both his silencing within Europeanculture and his quiet absorption in the picture. The choice of diction andsyntax suggests both the aesthetic power of the painting as it teaches a skill,and its political power in its ability to bring about conversion.

In Book Two there is the bald statement: ‘Make your own masterpieces,don’t copy ours’ (TH 37). This statement could be attributed to Veronese ashe addresses Tiepolo who copied from his work, or it could be the Europeanmaster addressing the colonial artist. In Book Four the speaker reminds usthat interaction between East and West is integral to European aestheticsbut also to Christianity:

Painting releases our benign surprise at a coal face, while we take a white hound

for granted, but what if among Three Magis in the rush manger one lifts a black hand?

(TH 122)

25 Cf. Giambattista Tiepolo, ed. Christiansen, picture 11 (p. 85); Svetlana Alpersand Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven 1994) pp. 10–11;Peter O. Krückman, Heaven on Earth: Tiepolo: Masterpieces of the Würzburg Years (NewYork 1996) p. 30.

26 Apelles was the most renowned painter of classical antiquity. He was commis-sioned by Alexander the Great to paint Campaspe; the artist fell in love with herand so Alexander allowed him to keep her.

TIEPOLO’S HOUND 19

Considering Tiepolo’s The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra (c.1744–7),27 thespeaker in the poem declares: ‘I was that grey Moor clutching a wolfhound’(TH 124). The Moor is neither black nor white but grey, and this connectshim with the grey twilight imagery used elsewhere in the poem. He noticeshow:

This was something I had not seen before, since every figure lent the light perfection,

that every hound had its attendant Moor restraining it with dutiful affection.

(TH 124–5)

The white hound is a catalyst for the meeting of the two cultures: the Moorand the hound are inseparable; the Moor’s position is that of a slave, yet heundertakes this occupation with ‘dutiful affection’; he is indoctrinated into aposition of ‘dutiful’ subservience like the hound he restrains. Yet Walcottrefuses to simply dichotomise the relationship between the cultures, and theplacing of the word ‘affection’ beside ‘dutiful’ expresses the mixed senti-ments of the Moor, who seems to love the dog he restrains and is complai-sant in his role as attendant.

Considering the numerous dogs in the paintings of Veronese andTiepolo, the poet cannot determine which artist painted the original houndthat he saw. In Book Four this matter is rendered irrelevant: ‘Research | couldprove the hound Tiepolo’s or Veronese’s | but I refused’ (TH 117). Yet laterhe cannot let go of his niggling obsession as he frantically scours differentcatalogues: ‘(The dog, the dog, where was the fucking dog?)’ (TH 125). Thenearest I have come to the description of the radiant white hound with apink inner thigh is in Tiepolo’s The Finding of Moses (1730s; a subject alsopainted by Veronese), held at the National Gallery in Edinburgh andexhibited at the New York Met in 1997.28

From the start of the poem, the purity of the white hound is contrastedwith a cowering, black Caribbean mongrel (TH 4, 27). The poet declaresthat the European hound of Tiepolo or Veronese is a ‘false muse’ (TH 136)which implies that the Caribbean stray is the authentic dog. The ‘starvedpup’ of the Caribbean is the counterpart of the ‘cossetted lapdog on its satinseat’ as the pup is ‘unsure | of everything, even its shadow’ (TH 138). Thetimid Caribbean pup is celebrated and ‘set down in the village to survive |like all my ancestry. The hound was here’ (TH 139). It would seem then,

27 Cf. William L. Barcham, Giambattista Tiepolo (London 1992) pp. 94–5. 28 See The Finding of Moses, in Giambattista Tiepolo, ed. Christiansen, picture 16a

(p. 129), and The Finding of Moses by both Tiepolo and Veronese in Alpers andBaxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, pp. 2 and 24.

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that the real quest for the poet is to follow the Caribbean dog and discardthe artificial hound of European culture. But such an easy dichotomy isproblematised within the poem.

For instance, sometimes the black and white dogs overlap in the poem sothe distinction between them becomes blurred, and so the sunlight in Portof Spain appears to be as ‘white as the mongrel’s ghost’ (TH 5). Both dogs,whether white hound or black mongrel, become symbols of erasure (TH 8).The European dog eludes the poet as light eludes the Impressionist painter:

until I doubt the very beast’s existence as much as mine sometimes, like the white sound

made by a snowfall on a winter fence, the thunder of my shadow on white sand.

(TH 121)

Like the Caribbean mongrel, the poet is unsure even of his own shadow.The image of the black shadow on white sand carries racial connotations. Itis also evocative of black print on white paper and the image of Christ writ-ing in the sand which appears in Another Life in the form of the ‘torturedchild, kneeling’ to write ‘on his slate of wet sand’ sibilant words ‘for thesea to erase’ (AL 209). For Walcott, writing is symbolic of erasure. TheCaribbean mongrel and the light on the Venetian hound’s thigh are reson-ant emblems of the occlusions within European culture and the absence ofan authentic self that cannot be accessed either through art or writing.

It is therefore appropriate that, in Walcott’s oil painting Baiting the Hook

(c.1984), the outline of a Caribbean dog is pencilled in at the feet of theblack fisherman but his image is not painted into the picture so that the dogappears as an insubstantial ghost (TH 62–3). The poet asks: ‘Was the whitebeast old age or only a long-wished- | for death, or simply the transparentsoul?’ (TH 124). The European hound represents a search for the self thatwill end in death or loss of the self: ‘I had followed in the footprints of thehound, | and not the hound my shadow, the hound was white, || if that wereall then nothing had been found’ (TH 127). The syntax of these lines isdeliberately convoluted to suggest the inseparability of each dog: the poetfollows the white hound rather than his shadow, the black Caribbeanmongrel, but the white hound signifies only a self-shaped hole and so white-ness erases blackness. In this way, both hounds (whether Caribbean mongrelor false European muse) become emblematic of the poet’s identity.

There is a comparable hole at the heart of Pissarro’s most famous paint-ings, and, in interview, Walcott wonders whether painting the Caribbeanlandscape was ever a real choice for Pissarro, who left for the Parisianmetropolis in 1855. He asks: ‘Was it considered a proper subject or was

TIEPOLO’S HOUND 21

that at the time completely out of the question?’29 History dictates what isconsidered art and what is not, and the suggestion is that colonial St Thomaswas not a worthy enough subject for Pissarro. Up until 1856, Pissarropainted the West Indian landscape, but thereafter his landscapes are entirelyFrench, with numerous pictures of Paris, Pointoise, and Louveciennes.30 InTiepolo’s Hound, Europe judges the Caribbean according to its own criteria,whereby ‘The empire of naming colonised even the trees, | referred ourleaves to their originals’ (TH 92). How can the Caribbean be painted insuch a way that it is original and beyond European influence? The answeroffered to us is that it can and it cannot.

For instance, when we look at Walcott’s gouache of Caribbean Domino

Players (1999) we see the vivid colours and the ‘other light’ of the place, theorange trees, the Caribbean women (TH 106–7). We also find an echo ofand challenge to Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players (1885–90) with its idea of‘proper perspective’ whereby each side of an object is directed to a centralpoint.31 Walcott’s painting refuses to operate according to ‘proper perspective’and so explores different ways of seeing. In Book Three, the poet addressesPissarro by taking up the challenge to paint that which Pissarro failed torepresent: ‘I settle before an easel to redeem the fault | that multiplies itselfin desperate survival’. He looks ‘at a surface that smiles then betrays. Thebetrayal is yours’ (TH 98). He also fails to capture the island in paint and soturns to poetry, where he employs the technical vocabulary of painters,referring to ‘impasto’, or painting thickly in layers, as a metaphor for hisown poetic technique.

The ‘masterful representation’ of ‘Rubens’s black faces’ goes some wayto capturing the Caribbean, but it is a colonial representation that is ‘com-plicit’ with Empire – until the ‘light of redemption came with Gauguin’, who

. . . made us seek what we knew and loved: the burnished skins

of pawpaws and women, a hill in Martinique. Our martyr. Unique. He died for our sins.

(TH 16–17)

29 ‘Derek Walcott: The Laureate of St. Lucia’, London Guardian, 17 Sept. 2000,pp. 50–4: 51. <http://www.nalis.gov.tt/Biography/bio_DerekWalcott-2-Nobel-Laureate.htm>.

30 See A Cove at St. Thomas and Two Women, Chatting by the Sea, Saint Thomas (both1856) from the Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon Collection, exhibited at the WashingtonNational Gallery; see also Ralph E. Shikes and Paula Harper, Pissarro: His Life andWork (London 1980) p. 40; Christoph Becker (ed.), Camille Pissarro (n.d.).

31 See Robin Blake, Essential Modern Art (Bath 2001) pp. 14–15.

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It is as if Gauguin is a Caribbean Christ who is able to say ‘Let there belight’, and so redeem European art with a biblical intensity as he paints theother life and the other light of Martinique. Alongside this moment in thepoem is Walcott’s pastel, Gauguin’s Studio (1986) and, later, a watercolourentitled Gauguin in Martinique, where the artist is depicted with a halo(TH 16–17).

Tiepolo’s Hound suggests that, although Pissarro does not paint the Caribbeanwith the redeeming quality of Gauguin, his French landscapes are haunted bythe West Indian. In Book Two, ‘There was no returning | like the African windthat kept billowing the canvas’s sail’ (TH 49). As Pissarro paints Louveciennes,there is the metaphor of his canvas being driven by the African:

He paints in dialect, like an islander, in a fresh France; when his swayed poplars tilt

you catch an accent in their leaves, or under his formal clouds a hill’s melodic lilt.

(TH 53)

The visual tilt of the poplars is rhymed with the audible lilt of the WestIndian accent. The cadences of the poem and the rhythm of the paintingsutter ‘African sounds’ (TH 54) or an alternative language to suggest a post-colonial redress and to introduce Walcott’s interest in the relation betweenthe visual and the audible whereby painting is music and poetry is painting.

Pissarro tutors Paul Cézanne, whose canvases are painted with lines likea musical stave indicating a change in key:

The practice of modulation by a succession of square progressive strokes transformed a canvas

by Cézanne to a musical score. This was not Impression but visible syntax . . .

now stroke or word or note presume their intent because of what they are: shape, sound, and stain,

compelled to one direction, an edge, a margin, a page, a frame, a phrase of melody, where error

was part of the acceptance of their origin.

(TH 57)

Using the words ‘stain’, ‘margin’, and ‘error’ at the end of each line, thepoem suggests that art’s origins are impure and the art incomplete. As thecouplets strain towards the edges of the paper or canvas, there is an interesthere in misrepresentation and the limitations of signification whether verbal,musical, or iconic. The artist, trapped by the limitations of representation,

TIEPOLO’S HOUND 23

tries to flee from them. As Walcott suggests in his 1996 article ‘Patterns ofExistence’, ‘the anguish of every art is that it is continually groping toescape from itself.’32

Turning to the ‘margin’, or even the ‘marginal’, the representative spacestrives towards absence, or

. . . the hyphen of unfinished things, the unachieved – like that shaft of light in the fading sky, the lance

of a brush crossing the canvas! O loss, that believed in Time and its talent! The racing shadows advance.

(TH 133)

Time is responsible for this loss and incompleteness, and there is no escapefrom it. Following the ‘Impressionist fascination for isolating the moment-ary effects of light’33 or the ‘racing shadows’, the artist declares ‘Time isnot | narrative’ (TH 94). Time is thought of in its purest sense as themoment that is made historical only by our narratives. For the painter enplein air, ‘There is no history, now only the weather’, whereby the artistattempts to represent a transitory and unpresentable jetzt-zeit or a sense ofthe here and now, while painting outdoors.34 As Walcott suggests, painting‘demands a concentration of the instant, one must adapt to the speed andbetrayal of changing clouds and the shadows made by these clouds . . . sothat three o’clock in the afternoon does not look like five o’clock in another,later corner of the surface’.35 The artist struggles with the logic of timeand representation, since art cannot reveal a pure present; it can onlyrepresent.

Nevertheless, the painter tries to capture an instant. In Another Life, thepainter is insistently aware of the shadow of his hand on the canvas orpaper as he paints in the sunlight:

There was his hand and the shadow of his hand, there was his thought and the shadow of that thought lying lighter than the shadow of a sound across coarse canvas or the staring paper,

32 Walcott, ‘Patterns of Existence’, Trinidad Guardian, 24 Mar. 1966, p. 7;cf. King, A Caribbean Life, p. 230.

33 See the discussion in Bensen, ‘The Painter as Poet’, p. 344.34 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, in Andrew

Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader (Oxford 1989) pp. 196–211. 35 Walcott, ‘Jackie Hinkson’, in Galerie (Trinidad), ed. Geoff McLean, 1/2 (1992);

repr. in The Massachusetts Review (Autumn–Winter 1994) pp. 413–17. Cf. King,A Caribbean Life, p. 533.

24 THE CAMBRI DGE Q UARTERL Y

the quiet panic at the racing sun his breath held before its trembling wick, the done with its horror of the undone that frays us all to pieces and breakdown, all of us, always, all ways, one after one.

(AL 262)

Art is ‘undone’ in that it is incomplete, unfixed, or ruined, and time isresponsible for the ‘horror of the undone’, as it wears down the artist,whose nerves become increasingly frayed. As Bruce King suggests, forWalcott, time is the condition of all paintings, including abstractions and actionpaintings, where the response is supposedly to the subconscious instant.36

In a review of the Trinidadian watercolourist Jackie Hinkson, Walcott says:‘Great water-colours are not merely superb sketches but awesome witnessesof time, to transience and a depth of mood.’37

Struggling with mutability, the poet finds another twilight zone in the‘fixed sublime in Tiepolo || whose light is always a little before sunset’ (TH

126). He attempts

. . . to touch the sublime,

to heighten the commonplace into the sacredness of objects made radiant by the slow glaze of time.

(TH 98)

Walcott’s book by Craven refers to Jan Vermeer’s (1632–75) technique ofusing amber to glaze the painting as a way of ‘transfiguring the remem-bered world’ but also ‘transfixing the memory and the vision’. Paradox-ically, Vermeer both ‘actualises and idealises’ the moment,38 as the momentis made more vivid or ‘radiant by the slow glaze of time’. In this way, arthopes to defy mutability as it makes a moment live in the luminosity of thepainting, and so renders the ordinary extraordinary.

Throughout Tiepolo’s Hound there is clearly a love of European art andaesthetics. Visiting Venice, the poet sees Tiepolo’s Rinaldo Taking Leave of Armida

and is astonished by the luminosity of the picture as it attempts to defy time:39

Her bronze hair’s hammered coil, its fiery glint catching the sunset’s grate; here is Rinaldo,

36 King, A Caribbean Life, pp. 532–3. 37 Walcott, ‘Jackie Hinkson’. 38 Cf. Craven, A Treasury of Art Masterpieces, pp. 131–9; discussion in Baugh,

‘Painters and Painting’, p. 245. 39 Cf. Craven, A Treasury of Art Masterpieces, p. 195.

TIEPOLO’S HOUND 25

his skin flushed with sunset, in the Phaidon print the light flares, dyeing his armoured shoulder.

In that pose of immobile departure, I hold the page to the ageing light as my own hand grows older;

they are eternally fixed, age after age, and it is I who fade, dimming beholder.

(TH 119)

The sun in the picture may be setting but Armida’s hair and Rinaldo’s skinwill always be flushed by light. Although the light of the beholder maybegin to dim, his hand age, and his eyesight fail, the picture is eternallyfixed in a moment of immobile departure. For art to work against mutabil-ity it must hold the moment and light captive, as do Vermeer’s glazedpaintings. The poet puns on the words ‘dye’ and ‘die’ to suggest that ‘in thePhaidon print’ the colours and light strain towards the permanent.

The artist’s role is godly as he creates a light that will be eternal. Hence,the young artist from Another Life can claim of his friend, Dunstan St Omer/Gregorias whose mural is painted behind the Altar at the Roseau Church,St Lucia: ‘Gregorias, lit | we were the light of the world’ (AL 220).40 InAnother Life the poet discovers art ‘as if he were Saul blinded with revelationof the true religion’.41 The poet is a New World Adam ‘blest with a virginal,unpainted world | with Adam’s task of giving things their names’ (AL 294).Worshipping the vision of Armida, who is linked with the symbol of‘bejewelled Venice’, he finds that

. . . With every sunrise he was stunned by a beauty he had seen before

so far beyond nature in her artifice he loved her with everything he could offer

(TH 118)

The syntax of the lines is ambiguous since the pronoun ‘her’ can be under-stood as referring to either the personification of Venice or the designs of afeminine Nature. In this way, the lines suggest two simultaneous readings:first, as the artist transforms the natural image of the sunrise, the viewersees a beauty that is entirely artful; second, the viewer sees that beauty isbeyond even the designs of a feminine Nature with the effect that thebeauty of the woman/Venice is supernatural. For the poet gazing at Rinaldo

40 Cf. the reproduction of Dunstan St Omer’s mural in King, A Caribbean Life,pp. 368–9.

41 Bensen, ‘The Painter as Poet’, p. 336; AL 186. Cf. 1 Sam. 9–10.

26 THE CAMBRI DGE Q UARTERL Y

Taking Leave of Armida, beauty is artifice; it is unnatural, and it also appearsto be supernatural or beyond nature.

In Tiepolo’s Hound the poet often asserts that his art is secular and suggeststhat the job of the artist is to be a heretic or iconoclast since her/his workshould not subscribe to a religious doctrine (TH 46). In spite of this, thepoet’s astonishment in the face of different works of art takes on the reli-gious intensity found in Another Life. However, in Tiepolo’s Hound there is lessa move towards the Old Testament visionary and more an interest in thetradition of Romanticism.42 Blake’s visions, Keats’s attention to artisticbeauty, and Coleridge’s interest in artistic perception are clearly affectingthe poet’s understanding of aesthetics. In the epigraph to Another Life Walcottturns to André Malraux’s (1901–76) romanticised account of Giotto(c.1266–1337) in his ‘Psychology of Art’: ‘What makes the artist is thecircumstance that in his youth he was more deeply moved by the sightof works of art than by that of the things which they portray’ (AL 143).Impressionist art also provides the poet with the idea that the meaning ofart increasingly lies in its surface rather than its content.43 What matterswhen the poet first sees the hound is not the hound itself, but his response tothe work of art and the impact of the ageless luminosity of the vision whichis ultimately lost by the ageing poet (TH 121).

Seeing the hound triggers an ‘event’ of representation, and Walcottobsessively returns to the impact of what occurs when he first encountersthe work of art. The lost dog in Tiepolo’s Hound bears testimony to thatunnameable aesthetic ‘event’ and the visionary consequences for the poetthereafter. In ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, Jean-François Lyotardrefers to Barnett Newman, describing the artistic ‘event’ as ‘a stranger toconsciousness’ as consciousness ‘cannot be constituted by it’:

it is what dismantles consciousness, it is what consciousness cannotformulate, and even what consciousness forgets in order to constituteitself. What we do not manage to formulate is that something happens,dass etwas geschieht. Or rather, and more simply, that it happens . . . dass

es geschieht. Not a major event in the media sense, not even a smallevent. Just an occurrence.44

This ‘event’ is just an occurrence – what Martin Heidegger called ein

Ereignis.45 Integral to this ‘event’ is a realisation of time or mutability: ‘Here

42 Cf. the biblical book of Daniel. 43 See the discussion in Bensen, ‘The Painter as Poet’. 44 ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, p. 197. 45 Ibid.

TIEPOLO’S HOUND 27

and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and that’s what issublime.’46

Although at a given moment the poet may carry ‘the shaft of benedic-tion’ (TH 50), life moves on with the effect that the poet’s hand on the pageor the artist’s hand on the canvas will always carry with it a shadow. Thelight fades and the vision dies. But, as the artist paints in the morgue atSt Barnard’s Hill, there is more at stake than the usual artistic concernwith mutability. Tiepolo’s Hound crystallises Walcott’s love for the elusiveaesthetic ‘event’ (or his vision of the hound) as he is held in a moment of‘ontological dislocation’ in ‘the agitated zone between life and death’:47

. . . I painted this fiction from the hound’s arch, because over the strokes and words

of a page, or a primed canvas, there is always the shadow that stretches its neck like a spectral hound, bending

its curious examining arc over what we do, both at our work’s beginning and at its ending,

a medieval memento mori, or a boy with his arrow at a dog-eared page or blank canvas, for every artisan

a skull and a pierced heart.

(TH 50)

Faced with the blank canvas, the artist lives not only with mutability butalso with the ‘possibility of nothing happening’ or that there will be no‘event’.48 As Lyotard suggests,

The inexpressible does not reside over there, in another [other] words,or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. In the deter-mination of pictorial art, the indeterminate, the ‘it happens’ is thepaint, the picture. The paint, the picture as occurrence or event, is notexpressible, and it is to this that it has to witness.49

Walcott’s vision of the hound bears witness to this inexpressible ‘event’, andso ‘it happens’.

46 Ibid., p. 199. 47 Ibid., p. 204. 48 Ibid., p. 198. 49 Ibid., p. 199.