NARRATOR:
In Anglo-American artist John Singleton Copley’s reimagining of a dramatic scene that took place in Havana, Cuba, in 1749, a 14-year-old sailor, Brook Watson, is attacked by a shark while swimming.
CHARLES BROCK:
That choice to essentially grab a moment in time in which the outcome is still not clear is one of the things that makes the painting so gripping. I think the drama is in Copley’s choice to focus right at the moment where life and death hang in the balance. My name is Charles Brock; I'm the associate curator of American and British Paintings at the National Gallery of Art.
YOAN CAPOTE:
My name is Yoan Capote. I'm a Cuban artist. For any Cuban, it's an overwhelming work. And the horror and the pain experienced by Watson makes us reflect on the drama of thousands of migrants in the Cuban Seas.
When you look at the sea, you are remembering so many stories the history of the country, the migrants that come, the Spanish that discover, or the people that leave, the battles on the sea, the people that die.
NARRATOR:
Much of the tension and emotion in Copley’s painting comes from the expressions of Watson’s fellow sailors. The most prominent is the young Black man featured near the top of the painting. This is a significant inclusion, especially since Havana was one of the central ports for the transatlantic slave trade.
CHARLES BROCK:
Copley is aspiring to capture bigger currents and bigger stories about history, one of them being the history that was taking place as the painting was being executed, which was of course the American Revolutionary War. One of the key issues during that war was slavery, juxtaposed with Americans’ aspirations for freedom. And there was a lot of ongoing open debate about the abolition of the slave trade during that moment in time.
