As his copies of Millais's The Blind Girl and Millet's The Gleaners testify, Warwick was a self-taught artist who, in order to learn how to paint, carefully copied and reproduced masterpieces of the past. Warwick took inspiration from English (the topographical draughtsmen, Turner or Millais), French (Millet) and German (Dürer) masters alike and Walcott's own apprenticeship as a painter but also, crucially, as a poet, developed along similar lines: ‘The whole course of imitations and adaptations was simply a method of apprenticeship’, he declared in a 1977 interview: ‘I knew I was copying and imitating and learning … I knew I had to absorb everything’. This ‘everything’ created a complex cluster of often contradictory interests, passions and affiliations. Falling in love with ‘English’ as the colonial empire was fading and at a time of cultural decolonisation, the young Walcott learnt English and American poetry but also the Classics and French literature at school at the same time in which he was exposed to St Lucia's multi-layered colonial (French and English) and linguistic heritage (Kweyol and the English continuum).

In ‘Outside the Cathedral’, Walcott recalls that, growing up as a Methodist on a Catholic island, he was socialised into thinking that both the local French-based Creole or Kweyol everyone spoke in the streets and the Latin used for the Mass by the Catholic majority were ‘languages of superstition’, ‘resignation’ or ‘unquestioning acceptance’ (OTC18). Nevertheless, he insists, if his Methodist chapel ‘was a little fort that defended the English language’, Latin and Kweyol always remained ‘potently seductive’ for him (OTC18). Walcott also proclaims that if he used to revere the topographical draughtsmen his father admired, he considered ‘contemptible’ ‘almost every English painter, except Turner and Constable’ (OTC21, 23) and he might have felt encouraged, as a St Lucian watercolourist, by the introductory chapter of Finberg's English Water Colour Painters which Warwick is likely to have owned and father and son to have read. Finberg begins by highlighting that, despite being prepared to accept that the ‘English school of painters in water colour deserves to be studied as a valuable expression of national character’, he thoroughly rejected the ‘patriotic’ notion – supported, for example, by Samuel Redgrave – that watercolour painting is a ‘peculiarly English art’.