Leanne Haynes (University of Essex)
This paper will focus on Derek Walcott's long poem Tiepolo's Hound, which was published in the year 2000 and is written almost entirely in rhyming couplets. In this text, Walcott traces the eventful life journey of the nineteenth-century “French” Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. We learn from the poem that this renowned painter was actually a Sephardic Jew born in 1830 in Charlotte Amalie, on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas, which was then under Danish colonial rule. Art has always been a passion for Walcott and there is no secret about his difficult decision to choose between poet and painter: 'My pen replaced a brush' (TH, p. 19). This choice of vocation is the subject of a much earlier autobiographical work, published in 1973 and entitled Another Life. Interestingly, Walcott includes 26 of his own paintings in Tiepolo's Hound, of which only 2 leave the colourful palette of the Caribbean behind. These paintings are a crucial intervention in the poetic text, so too are their connections with Pissaro's prolific output as well as many other painters explored by Walcott, such as some of those by Veronese and, of course the poem's namesake, Tiepolo. This paper then is a comparative study bringing together the two mediums of art and poetry. I will examine Walcott's position as both artist and poet and how his work draws upon outside influences in order to represent the Caribbean and its peoples.
