Tiepolo's Hound by Derek Walcott

Tiepolo's Hound
By Derek Walcott

The black-and-white photograph on the back of Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound, shows the poet sitting before an easel, straw hat atop his head, dipping his brush into a jar of paint. A Nobel laureate, he is known primarily for his epic poems, including Omeros (1990) and The Bounty (1997), and for his work in the theatre - his play Dream on Monkey Mountain won an Obie in 1971. But Walcott, who passed away in 2017, was also an accomplished painter. The 26 prints that illustrate Tiepolo's Hound, mostly images of island life, heighten the pleasure of reading him.

A native of St. Lucia, Walcott was a painter about as long as he was a writer. But language was his first love, the vehicle that best enabled him to explore his favourite topic: the relationship between the opposing factions of his Caribbean heritage.

Walcott was of mixed African and English ancestry and, like colonized people everywhere, he was heir to a dual, often conflicted, cultural tradition. Yet it must be said that he was not by any means tormented, for he perceived in the Caribbean's "uncertain heritage" unfettered literary license.

In the narrative poem Tiepolo's Hound, he traces the path of another artist who grappled with a divided cultural legacy, the painter Camille Pissarro. Born 100 years before Walcott on the West Indian island of St. Thomas, Pissarro, like Walcott, was of mixed ancestry - descended on his father's side from Sephardic Jews who fled Portugal during the Inquisition. And like Walcott, he would abandon the Caribbean to seek artistic fulfillment abroad. In recounting the development of Pissarro's artistic vision, Walcott parallels it with his own.

Pissarro belongs to the school of French 19th-century painters that came to be known as the Impressionists. So beloved now, the Impressionists were berated then for their innovative style and technique. They endeavoured to convey the haphazard experience of seeing, to capture the essential impression of a scene that lingers in the mind. Walcott, the poet, shares their fidelity to visual truth. In Tiepolo's Hound he writes:

What should be true of the remembered life is a freshness of detail: this is how it was -

the almond's smell from a torn almond leaf, the spray glazing your face from the bursting waves.

Walcott discovers his artistic ideal embodied in the image of a dog in a Venetian painting hanging in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Then I caught a slash of pink on the inner thigh of a white hound entering the cave of a table

so exact in its lucency at The Feast of Levi I felt my heart halt.

The sight of this dog he calls Tiepolo's hound gives Walcott the same intense experience sought by Pissarro and his fellows. His preoccupation with it leads him to Venice, but enthralled as he is with this Venetian painting, it is still the French Impressionists who influence his canvas. Walcott's Domino Players (1999) is a calypso version of Cezanne's The Card Players (1890-92); his Savannah Gallop: Port of Spain (1985) recalls Degas's horse-racing series, especially At the Races: They're Off (1860-62). Walcott's depiction of the priory and church at Gros Islet evokes Pissarro's street scenes of Pontoise. And the influence works both ways: the tenor and hue of Pissarro's The Hermitage at Pontoise, for example, resembles nothing so much as a sleepy afternoon in Charlotte Amalie, the St. Thomas village where Pissarro was raised.

"Domino Players", (gouache on paper), done by Derek Walcott in 1999.

Tiepolo's Hound follows Pissarro to France, where he settled in the mid-1850s. There, he struggles to reconcile the colours and textures of his island home with the honoured traditions of the European masters. Pissarro is an uneasy West Indian in Paris, not to mention an ambivalent Jew. Walcott, as a black man abroad, empathizes with Pissarro's sense of alienation. He links the ostracism of blacks and Jews across time and space.

the horizons underline their origins - Pissarros from the ghetto of Braganza

who fled the white hoods of the Inquisition for the bay's whitecaps, for the folding cross

of a white herring gull over the Mission droning its passages from Exodus.

The "white hoods of the Inquisition" and the "folding cross of the white herring gull" also connote the garb and accoutrements of America's Ku Klux Klan.

Walcott luxuriates in language. His verses are a surfeit of sound, colour and drama. His tone ranges from the archaic:

(catch her sweet breath, be the blest one near her at that Lucullan table, lean when she speaks),

to the Hebraic - the voice of Pissarro's admonishing grandfather:

"so listen, my son Joseph's son,"

to the occasional lilt of patois, as when Pissarro, on the verge of leaving home, imagines the mocking voices of the former slaves working along the wharf:

Stares probe him, their fishing needles sewing nets in the broad- blade shadows of the teak,

their mouths stitched shut. "We know you going. We is your roots. Without us you weak."

Tiepolo’s Hound by Derek Walcott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
208 pages

Like many West Indian artists, Pissarro believed he had to travel abroad to study Old World traditions. Yet he could not discard his Caribbean roots. On the contrary, Pissarro transported his island sensibility to France: he placed the Caribbean's sun-burnt shades and drifting shadows on the Impressionist palette. With Tiepolo's Hound, Derek Walcott proves that tradition swings both ways.

An earlier version of this piece appeared in Montreal Gazette.