Audio Stop 208

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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

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 60-B

Artist Yoan Capote and associate curator of American and British paintings Charles Brock discuss the emotions and histories of the transatlantic slave trade present in Copley’s dramatic scene.

Read full audio transcript

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.

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