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  Home>Stories>Centering the Black Sailor in Copley’s “Watson and the Shark”
      

      
      Search Art & Society Centering the Black Sailor in Copley’s “Watson and the Shark” min read
 Alysha Page, a former Bechhoefer Graduate Intern in American and British Painting and current Baltimore City Hall Curator, considers one of the first Black figures at the center of a history painting. This painting by John Singleton Copley now carries the deceptively simple title Watson and the Shark, whichtells a singular story about a real event: young Brook Watson’s harrowing rescue from the jaws of a ravenous shark in Havana Harbor in 1749. But as the work’s first title—A boy attacked by a shark and rescued by some seamen in a boat—indicates, there are other stories at play here besides Watson’s. The lives of the men attempting to save the boy also hang in the balance. Chief among them is the Black sailor who presides over the scene from near the top of the canvas, silhouetted by the sky.
 We look onto the side of a rowboat crowded with nine men trying to save a pale, nude young man who flails in the water in front of us as a shark approaches, mouth agape, from our right in this horizontal painting. In the water, the man floats with his chest facing the sky, his right arm overhead and the other stretched out by his side. Extending to our left, his left leg is bent and the right leg is straight, disappearing below the knee. His long blond hair swirls in the water and he arches his back, his wide-open eyes looking toward the shark behind him. To our right, the shark rolls up out of the water with its gaping jaws showing rows of pointed teeth. In the boat, eight of the men have light or tanned complexions, and one man has dark brown skin. The man with brown skin stands at the back center of the boat, and he holds one end of a rope, which falls across the boat and around the upper arm of the man in the water. Another man stands at the stern of the boat, to our right, poised with a long, hooked harpoon over the side of the boat, ready to strike the shark. His long dark hair blows back and he wears a navy-blue jacket with brass buttons, white breeches, blue stockings, and his shoes have silver buckles. Two other men wearing white shirts with blousy sleeves lean over the side of the boat, bracing each other as they reach toward the man in the water. An older, balding man holds the shirt and body of one of this pair and looks on, his mouth open. The other men hold long oars and look into the water with furrowed brows. The tip of a shark’s tail slices through the water to our right of the boat, near the right edge of the canvas. Along the horizon line, which comes three-quarters of the way up the composition, buildings and tall spires line the harbor. The masts of boats at port creates a row of crosses against the light blue sky. Steely gray clouds sweep across the upper left corner of the canvas and the sky lightens to pale, butter yellow at the horizon.
      
        
        
            
         	  John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778, oil on canvas, Ferdinand Lammot Belin Fund, 1963.6.1
 The Black Sailor at the Top of the Pyramid The Black man stands upright at the top of the pyramid-like composition of this busy harbor scene. Balancing the boat, he plays a prominent role in the action unfolding around him. He has already thrown the crucial lifeline to the boy in the water below. The Black crewman and Watson dramatically reach their right arms toward each other, their open hands framing and animating the heart of the painting. The model for the Black sailor was clearly a distinct individual, but his identity remains unknown. Nevertheless, we do know that any Black sailor in Cuba in the mid-18th century, whether indentured, enslaved, or free, would have led a dangerous and precarious life.
 Possible model for the Black sailor in John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark
John Singleton Copley, Head of a Negro, 1777 or 1778, oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Gibbs-Williams Fund, 52.118.
 Black Bodies in the Middle Passage and Havana Harbor Just as the Black man is Watson’s main lifeline, so too were Black bodies the lifeblood of the transatlantic slave trade and colonial economic success. The merchant ships shown in the harbor indicate the ubiquitous power of imperial colonial commerce. The triangular trade was at its height when the painting was created in 1778: Europeans went to Africa to exchange manufactured goods for enslaved people, transported the enslaved Africans across the Atlantic in the Middle Passage to the West Indies, sold them in the colonies, and brought raw materials like sugar and coffee back to Europe. Nearly three-fifths of the people trafficked during the transatlantic trade were transported and sold during the 18th century. Working on a boat in Havana Harbor in 1749, the Black sailor would have been surrounded by tens of thousands of captive Africans and no doubt would have known of their terrifying journeys across the Atlantic. Enslavers were known to cast people who became sick or who died from the brutal conditions of the Middle Passage into the ocean, leaving them to be devoured by sharks. Many more met the same tragic end by throwing themselves at the mercy of the sea, taking their own lives rather than being subjected to more of the slave trade’s terrors. A Black sailor called on to rescue a white boy from the shark-infested waters would have been all too aware that no such mercy was being afforded his fellow Africans.
 In the original sketch, the sailor at the apex of the painting is a white man. The change to a man of African descent points to Copley being intentional about the Black sailor.
John Singleton Copley, Rescue Group, between 1777 and 1778, black chalk heightened with white, squared for transfer in red chalk, on green gray laid paper, Detroit Institute of Arts, City of Detroit Purchase, 48.203.
 Copley’s Awareness of Black Labor on the Eve of the American Revolution In a sketch he drew before creating the painting, Copley had made the sailor at the top of his composition a white man. When he painted the figure as a man of African descent instead, Copley acknowledged the importance of Black labor in the success of the colonies as the Americas inched closer to revolution. As political tensions grew, the artist wrote about the inevitable horrors of war. Copley was a friend to both British loyalists and rebels. He painted portraits of rich Bostonians like Paul Revere, but also married into the Clarke merchant family.  His father-in-law, Richard Clarke, supported the British, and the family left for London in 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution. Copley never returned to the Americas.
 A group of three adults and four children are gathered on and around a couch in an interior space that opens out to a distant hilly landscape in this horizontal portrait painting. All seven people have pale skin and are clustered across the middle of the composition. To our left, an older man wearing a white wig, white cravat, and black jacket sits facing us as he holds a squirming baby on his lap. The man’s slightly tanned face is turned to gaze to our right with pale blue eyes under thick brown eyebrows. Jowls line his jaw around pursed lips. The child in his lap twists to look up at him. She holds up her pudgy arms, grasping a gold-colored rattle with bells in her left hand. She has blond hair, smooth skin, and rose-red lips, and she wears a long white gown with a petal-pink sash around the waist. Behind this pair a younger man stands with his body angled to our right in profile as he turns his face to look at us from the corners of his eyes, with a faint smile on his closed pink lips. He also wears a white cravat and black jacket, but his hair is dove gray. His forearms rest on a low, olive-green stone column in front of him, his hands crossed at the wrist as he holds papers in his right hand. To our right and at the center of the group, a young girl stands facing us with her arms crossed at her waist. A lacy, ivory cap frames tawny brown bangs that sweep across her forehead. Her petite nose, brown eyes, and rose-red lips are set within her round face. She wears an ivory-white gown belted with a sash that shimmers from pink to copper as it cascades down her right side, to our left. On her other side, the final trio includes a woman sitting with her arms entwined around two more small children. They sit on a cranberry-red, brocaded sofa. Her sapphire-blue gown has a voluminous skirt and is trimmed with gold stitching along its square neckline. The fabric gleams softly, suggesting silk. Her dark brown hair is piled high on her head, topped by a sheer white veil. Her body is angled toward us, but her head is turned in profile to our left, bowing to almost brush noses with the young child standing alongside her. Shoulder-length brown hair falls to the child’s shoulders as the head is tipped back to gaze at the woman with a wide smile. One arm reaches up and embraces the woman’s neck and the other rests on her knee. The child wears a butter-yellow gown with a white sash around the waist. The fourth and final child lies belly down across the red and copper bolster cushion of the couch so her elbows are propped on her mother’s lap. The child turns her head back to look at us with dark eyes and slight smile on her pale pink lips. Her blond hair falls down the back of her white gown, which is belted with a gold sash. A child’s doll and hat with a rounded crown, a narrow brim, and an indigo-blue feather rests in folds of the curtain on the floral-patterned carpet near the lower left corner of the painting. The scene is framed by rust-red drapery edged in gold hanging from the upper left. In the landscape seen through an opening behind the family, hills fade from sage green to slate blue, and they become more faint as they recede to the horizon, which comes about three-quarters of the way up this composition. The opening is framed with a flowering vine climbing the wall behind the woman.
      
        
        
            
         	  John Singleton Copley, The Copley Family, 1776/1777, oil on canvas, Andrew W. Mellon Fund, 1961.7.1
 Sir Brook Watson at 63 years old. Robert Dighton Jr, Sir Brook Watson, 1st Bt, published August 1803, hand-coloured etching, NPG D4645, © National Portrait Gallery, London
 And What Happened to Watson? Brook Watson survived his ordeal and eventually became a prominent merchant who gained his wealth through the transatlantic slave trade. In 1788, Watson (now 53), spoke in the British Parliament against abolishing the slave trade. Watson’s main concern was that abolition would ruin the West Indies market for refuse fish, which he sold as food for enslaved African people. He actively promoted his own story as a message about personal courage and heroism when he gave this painting to a boys’ school in 1803. He made sure that the school displayed it with a plaque describing his rescue and forever memorializing his encounter. In focusing on Watson’s fate, art historians have often failed to see that the painting does more than memorialize the encounter between a youth and a shark. While the grand painting captures a specific moment in Brook Watson’s story, it also calls on viewers to consider the reality of Black life during colonial times. It depicts the humanity of a Black sailor helping to save someone who, if their roles were reversed, may not have reached out to save him.
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 July 21, 2023








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