Peter Doig created the present work after his monumental oil painting, Painting for a Poet (DW) (2025), one of the centrepieces of the artist’s acclaimed exhibition, House of Music, at Serpentine South Gallery, London.

The composition takes the Piazzetta di San Marco in Venice as its architectural stage. Yet, the scene is unmistakably filtered through Doig’s layered imagination: at the composition’s heart sits a lion. The same recurrent creature stalks his Trinidadian paintings, here transplanted to the grandeur of a European civic space and charged with the heraldic weight of Saint Mark’s emblem.

The subject of the work invokes Doig’s late friend and creative counterpart, the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, whose own meditations on Venice and the lion of imperial power resonate beneath the image’s surface. As with their celebrated collaboration Morning, Paramin (2016), in which Walcott composed poems in response to fifty of Doig’s paintings, this work sustains a dialogue between literary imagination and pictorial form that reaches beyond elegy into a living act of homage.