SOURCE: “Naipaul's Painters and Their Pictures,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1976, pp. 67-80.

In the following essay, Winser traces Naipaul's use of painters and visual art in his first seven novels and two collections of short stories.

A reading of V. S. Naipaul's manifold prize-winning fiction reveals his continuing interest in the art of painting. Each of Naipaul's seven novels and two short-story collections either presents an important character who paints or alludes to at least one imagined artist. Naipaul likes to depict his characters in the creative act of painting, affording him the chance to describe their work in style and content. Some of the painting episodes in Naipaul's fiction and the pictures painted by his characters are put to very sophisticated use by their real creator. Like the dream performed by one of Dostoevsky's underground insomniacs or the song sung by a Shakespearean...