a boy attacked by a shark--6/26/26

26 Jun 2026

a boy attacked by a shark--6/26/26

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Today's selection -- from A Revolution in Color by Jane Kamensky. John Singleton Copley’s 1778 masterpiece, A Boy Attacked by a Shark and Rescued by Some Seamen in a Boat, became an instant sensation. It should be considered with another of his paintings, Head of a Favourite Negro, a highly detailed, empathetic study of an unidentified black man, painted as a preparatory portrait for that work. It was a time of “an efflorescence of black life in London”:

“The painting on which [John Singleton] Copley and [Brooke] Watson collaborated was a picture of empire, albeit on a vastly different scale. At once a seascape, a city view, and a history painting with a cast of ten men and two sharks, it was a more complex work than anything Copley had painted before. It is unclear who posed for the picture. Five of the ten human figures, including the harpooner and four of the seated oarsmen, are caricatures rather than likenesses, their expressions based on physiognomic masks meant to incarnate the emotions such a scene would have aroused. (In this sense they resemble the awestruck witnesses who populate The Ascension and The Nativity.) The forty-two-year-old Watson could not possibly have played the nude young hero, his blond hair billowing in the waves. The imperiled youth is as figured part man, part statue; art historians have found antecedents for his pose in sources ranging from the Laocoön to the Borghese Warrior, both of which Copley had seen in Rome. But others in the group are highly particular. The trio of rescuers at the gunwale–the boatswain, with his bald pate and fringe of chestnut hair going to gray, a young sailor with the shiny black locks and pale skin of an Irish tar, and another lad, his sandy eyebrows salt flecked–read as men, not mannequins.

“Most striking of all is the standing figure who holds the rope and who, together with the jacketed harpooner, forms the apex of the composition. He, too, is individual rather than typological. And like very few central figures acting heroically in eighteenth-century paintings, he is black: a sailor who embodies the African diaspora, the engine driving the Atlantic trade. Several of the critics who reviewed the sensational picture thought Copley had erred in making the African figure a site of sentiment and sympathy. ‘It would not be unnatural to place a woman in the attitude of the black,’ wrote a reviewer in the General Advertiser, ‘but he, instead of being terrified, ought, in our opinion, to be busy.’ The sailor's combination of stillness and stoicism bothered other critics as well. An article in the St. James Chronicle called him an ‘idle Black,’ paralyzed by ‘the connate Fear of his Country for that ravenous Fish,’ as if a dread of sharks were some primitive superstition.

“Now as then, the figure provokes–as the artist meant him to, for he chose carefully. Several preparatory drawings for the picture survive, making clear that Copley originally envisioned the man as a European. The character of that central figure, then, was something about which Copley had gone back and forth–perhaps in discussion with Watson–during the early stages of the picture's design. In the course of his work on The Pepperrell Family the same year, the painter had made the opposite choice, eliminating a black figure planned for the right side of the portrait. An early sketch shows a serving boy in turban and livery, a nod toward the conventions of English noble portraiture as well as toward the slaveholding heritage of the Pepperrells and the Royalls. But in later drawings and in the final painting, Copley went another way, balancing the composition with two dogs at the opposite edge. It does not seem an exaggeration to suggest that the painter and his patrons were wrestling, that year, with the political and pictorial possibilities of figuring men of African descent.

Watson and the Shark (1778) depicts the rescue of Brook Watson from a shark attack in Havana, Cuba.

“Nothing is known of Copley's model, of whom he also made, at presumably the same time, a vivid oil sketch. As many who have written about the picture note, it is a strikingly intimate portrait; here is a man, not a minstrel.93 He is portrayed at close range, his gaze direct, with his mouth partly open, as if in conversation. In both the sketch and, to a lesser degree, in Watson, the man's teeth are visible: a striking departure in Copley's practice. Only once before had he painted a smile; in The Copley Family, the artist's four-year-old son and namesake shows a row of gleaming baby teeth. He would do so only twice more, both times in pictures of his children.

“The sketch stayed in Copley's family, only to be auctioned upon the death of the artist's son, in 1864. In the catalog, it is described this way:

“Who was the man, and whose 'favourite' was he? Had he come to London in the household of one of Copley's intimates–Thomas Hutchinson, perhaps, or Ralph Izard? The Carolina planter almost certainly brought slaves to accompany him and his wife on their grand tour of the Continent.

“It is less likely that the ‘favourite negro’ was part of Copley's retinue in Leicester Square. Sukey Copley sailed with servants, but her father's accounts describe them as maids. (Copley's granddaughter, the author of a hagiographic memoir written shortly after Head of a Favourite Negro sold, took pains to establish that Mrs. Copley's young maid was white, ‘with the American beauty of feature and complexion which exposed her to much remark and attention in London.') Copley's male servants appear to have stayed behind in Boston. In the spring of 1777, ‘[The slave] Cato, of Mr. Copley,’ married Lucy, ‘of Mr. Goldthwait,’ at the Brattle Square Church, where Copley and Sukey had wed eight years before. [The slave] Snap remained in the household of Mary Pelham, scraping by on Cambridge Street after the siege. ‘Snap behaves some thing better than he has done for some time past,’ she told her faraway son in 1780. ‘I hope he will be more grateful.’

“It is hard to say whether Snap would have been better off in Boston or in London. In both places, the logic of slavery was increasingly unstable. In 1772, England's chief justice, William Murray, first Earl of Mansfield, had ruled in Somerset v. Stewart that no ‘positive law’ allowed for a slave from the American territories who escaped bondage in the home islands to be forcibly returned to slavery overseas. In an opinion followed with great interest on both sides of the Atlantic, Mansfield dwelt as much on the vulnerability of British liberty as on the rights of African slaves. At stake, wrote the abolitionist Granville Sharp, was whether the core of Britain was to be made ‘as base, wicked and Tyrannical as our colonies.’ Somerset did not abolish slavery. But the ruling weakened the institution in Britain–fatally so, many believed. For American slave owners, the decision thus marked one more reason to cast Mansfield as an inveterate enemy of colonial rights. (It is he who shackles America while Lord North forces tea down her throat in the famous 1774 cartoon.) A small but growing number of activists against the slave trade likewise treated the Somerset case as a milestone: a sign that Britain might yet earn its vaunted association with liberty.

“It is no coincidence that the years around the Somerset decision witnessed an efflorescence of black life in London. The city's population of people of African descent swelled with the eastward journeys of colonials in the flush of victory following the Seven Years' War, and then grew once again with the flight of thousands of loyalists after 1775. Estimates of the number of black Londoners vary, but during the American War it likely exceeded ten thousand.

“Their presence at once precipitated and was reflected by a shift in the figuration of black people, especially black men, in British art and letters. Once relegated to roles as exotic staffage–’part of the colorful decor setting off princely magnificence,’ as one scholar has written–some black Londoners became the subjects of meticulous likenesses.

“In 1768, the fashionable portraitist Thomas Gainsborough painted a bust of Ignatius Sancho, an African-born former slave then employed as a valet to the Duke of Montagu. Around the same time, Joshua Reynolds completed an oil sketch of an anonymous black man, likely his servant. While these works, like their antecedents, made a fetish of black skin and what figured in the popular imagination as exotic ‘African’ features, they also projected dignity, personhood, even a natural aristocracy. Gainsborough's Sancho, painted in Bath in 1768, was engraved before 1782, when a collection of the freedman's letters was published with great fanfare. Reynolds's students painted numerous copies of his study, which Copley could have seen in the master's Leicester Square studio. Certainly he saw the prints of black figures that circulated, many of them caricaturing the fashionable appearance of men like Julius Soubise, a well-known black dandy who featured in several engravings in 1772 and 1773. Copley knew there was a vogue for such images.

"No black celebrity occasioned more notice than Boston's Phillis Wheatley, who visited London in the summer of 1773, about a year after the Somerset decision and just before the publication of her book of poems. She visited Lord Dartmouth, the American secretary, to whom she had written a paean the previous year. Benjamin Franklin–himself a slave owner–paid her court; Granville Sharp accompanied her on a visit to the Tower of London. She also met with Brook Watson, who may have had some trading connection to John Wheatley, who had bought Phillis when she landed, chained, as a young girl on the Boston docks, and owned her still. Watson gave her ‘a Folio Edition of Milton's Paradise Lost, printed on a Silver Type, so call'd from its elegance,’ Wheatley said. His coat of arms was affixed to the flyleaf. It featured three martlets, small black birds usually depicted without legs: severed things.

“Copley's daughter Mary later recalled that Paradise Lost was her father's favorite book. Did Watson and the Shark depict a bygone American Eden? And what of the ‘bondage’ of the American people? That, of course, was the question on everyone's lips in the spring of 1778, when Watson transfixed the crowds at the Royal Academy. The painting's narrative of a lost leg in a lost harbor makes it tempting to read it as an image of the violent dismemberment of Britain's empire, as some scholars have done. But in the end, Watson is less an allegory of loss than a parable of redemption: of victory snatched quite literally from the jaws of defeat. That February, as the long-expected Franco-American alliance became a reality, Lord North had hatched a plan to treat with the American rebels, offering terms that stopped just shy of independence. Less than a fortnight after the peace commissioners departed London for Philadelphia, a moment of extreme oscillation in the waves of empire, the academy exhibition opened.

“Watson caught the national mood. The magic of the picture, as some critics noted, lay precisely in its presentation of an instant of unresolved peril: pitched as if at the crest of an impossibly high wave, before plunging into the looming trough of the next. The shark had already struck twice, noted the General Evening Post in an article about the painting's factual grounding. The predator was approaching for the third blow, "the very instant" when Watson would have been devoured. "This is the moment the ingenious artist has selected from the distressing scene," the author–likely Watson or Copley–explained: the painter as dramaturge, as puppeteer, as conjurer of a magic lantern show. Copley had chosen well, noted the General Advertiser's critic. ‘He has improved upon the horror of the shark, by leaving it unfinished, and we think he studied narrowly the human mind in this circumstance. No certain and known danger can so powerfully arouse us, as when uncertain and unlimited.’ With Watson, in other words, Copley had pioneered the visual mechanics of suspense, not a signal feature of history painting, which tended toward the marmoreal, portraying heroes who had died trying, battles long since won or lost. No lover of art or student of history who stood in line before West's Death of General Wolfe, for example, had any doubt whether Britain had triumphed at Quebec, much less whether Wolfe had survived his glory. In Watson, life hung in the balance.

“One critic praised the painting's powerful sense of place and moment, a sensory tour de force that conveyed ‘the Dampness of the hazy hot Climate,’ in that ‘glorious Time, and the Place where our Tars so nobly exerted themselves.’ Watson's ‘glorious time’ in 1749 prefigured the British triumph at Havana in 1762; perhaps history would repeat itself. Perhaps the king's forces would hold America, and even retake the pearl of the Antilles. Perhaps the empire would not only endure but thrive, as Watson had so improbably done. ‘The proposals to America are much too favourable to be rejected by them,’ predicted one writer in the General Evening Post in a letter that appeared just above Watson's narrative of the facts upon which the painting was ‘founded.’ If the peace commissioners prevailed; ‘stocks will rise .... The very idea of America not being against us will make a war with France appear as a trifling affair, particularly when English, Scotch, and Irish, laying aside all bickerings, become one family, one people, and with inseparable interests.' A family much like the united tribes that peopled the boat that rescued Watson. Copley had painted an image of a war in which Britain might still prevail–and of the battle it was arguably winning: the contest for liberty, against the hypocrisy of American slave owners proclaiming themselves the guardians of human freedom.

"The collision of Watson's moment, ca. 1749, and London's moment, ca. 1778, ignited Copley's English career. ‘It is curious to remark how men sometimes by a kind of casual happiness exceed themselves,’ noted the author of ‘The Painter's Mirror,’ a column that dished the exhibitions every April. Copley had hung three pictures. One of them, a woman's portrait, was innocuous, meriting ‘neither praise nor censure.’ The Pepperrell Family, the reviewer said, was ‘a mere daubing.’ But Watson, with its cumbersome title–A boy attacked by a Shark, and rescued by some Seamen in a Boat; founded on a fact which happened in the harbor of the Havannah–was the hit of the season. ‘Mr. Copley is a native of America,’ said the critic who wrote for the St. James Chronicle. He had ‘sent some excellent Portraits to the former Exhibitions, before he had been improved by any academical Education in Europe.’ But improved he was. With Watson, Copley had revealed himself as one of ‘our Countrymen’: an English artist and ‘a Genius, who bids fair to rival the great Masters of the ancient Italian Schools.”