Watson and the Shark’s exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1778 generated a sensation, partly because such a grisly subject was an absolute novelty. In 1749, 14-year-old Brook Watson had been attacked by a shark while swimming in Havana Harbor. John Singleton Copley’s pictorial account of the traumatic ordeal shows nine seamen rushing to help the boy, while the bloody water proves he has just lost his right foot. The rescuers’ anxious expressions and actions reveal both concern for their thrashing companion and a growing awareness of their own peril. Miraculously, Watson was saved and went on to become a successful merchant and politician.
NARRATOR:
This dramatic scene by John Singleton Copley is one of the most admired paintings in the National Gallery.
Curator Nikolai Cikovsky, Jr.
NICOLAI CIKOVSKY:
“Watson and The Shark is a richly complex picture; the force of which is primarily emotional. It’s a painting that depicts an incident from the early life of Brook Watson, who was 14 years old at the time, terrifying really in that—particularly in the great shark into whose mouth we, almost like Brook Watson himself, stare unavoidably. Watson was a sailor aboard a merchant ship that had put into Havana harbor. Watson decided to swim in Havana harbor and as he was doing so, he was attacked by a large, ferocious shark, which bit off half of his right leg. Watson was thrashing about when his shipmates came to his rescue, killed the shark and saved Watson. That’s the episode that Copley depicted. He depicted it because Watson, later in his life, commissioned the painting.”
“But why would someone think of commissioning such a picture? Well, we can I think be pretty certain how Brook Watson regarded it. Here is this young man suffering with unimaginable trauma of being attacked by the shark; who overcomes and survives and surmounts this early difficulty to become a very successful businessman in London, served as Lord Mayor--it’s this success in life despite this difficulty that is essentially the moral of his painting.”
“But it’s a painting that by using devices of art which people at the time would have recognized transmutes this physically violent episode into something else. The figure on the bow using the boat hook as a harpoon to slay the shark is borrowed from a figure of the Archangel Michael driving Satan from Heaven. And in this way the picture acquires a religious dimension, as well, and it is, of course, fundamentally, a painting about being saved from death—about salvation.”
NARRATOR:
According to the inscription, Watson gave the picture to London’s Royal Hospital of Christ in his will. There it hung as an inspirational example of someone who had survived terrible tragedy and gone on to fame and fortune. The hospital served as an orphanage, and Watson himself had been raised there.
