Watson and the Shark

1778

Oil on canvas, 71 3/4 × 90 1/2 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington

A shark attack on a fourteen-year-old in Havana harbour, posed after Raphael and other earlier art: a private accident staged as high drama.

Look at

The figures make a pyramid from the boy in the water up to the man with the harpoon.
The boy's pale, bare body is the one large light shape in the water, set off against the green swell.
A row of reaching arms runs from the boat down toward the boy, with the shark's open jaws closing in from the right.

A success at the Royal Academy in 1778; Copley had never been to the Caribbean and pieced the harbour together from maps and prints.
The NGA notes that no earlier European painting of the century had given a Black man so central and heroic a place.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain