Watson and the Shark

Watson and the Shark is the painting completed in 1778 by Anglo-American painter John Singleton Copley. It shows the famous 1749 shark attack that left Brook Watson- who would go on to become the Lord Mayor of London and a prosperous merchant, with one less leg. Three decades after the incident, Watson commissioned the artwork as evidence of his tenacity and fortitude. 1774 saw the move of Copley, a colonial Bostonian and engraver apprentice, to London. Before his relocation, Copley was one of the leading portrait artist in colonial America. The painting Watson and the Shark was the first major historical artwork he produced. It marked the shift in his painting style from portraiture to large narrative works from history that had an influence from European art. The painting captures the dramatic moment before Watson's rescue. It shows sailors struggling to save him from an approaching shark. A Black sailor lowers a rope toward Watson and has become a central figure in modern scholarship, symbolizing both heroism and the transatlantic slave trade that shaped the Atlantic world. Copley had to rely on studies of maps, prints, and classical works of art because he had never travelled to Cuba or encountered a shark. Copley was successful in integrating a convention of history with artistic style. At its initial Royal Academy exhibition in 1778, Watson and the Shark received praise from critics for its gripping portrayals of the boundary between life and death. Other versions of the picture are on exhibit in the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, while the original is housed in the National Gallery of Art. The work's significance as one of the key works of eighteenth-century art is further cemented by scholars' ongoing examination of it through the prisms of race, empire, and creative technique.