Watson and the Shark (Copley)

The painting above is entitled "Watson and the Shark" by John Singleton Copley.  It is based on a real event in Havana in which fourteen year old cabin boy, Brooks Watson, fell off a British ship.  He was rescued at last from the water but not before he lost a foot to an attacking shark.  The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1778.  To place that in historical context, the American colonies had declared independence two years prior and were now engaged in a war with England; France was suffering turmoil and economic hardship due to drought, crop failure, and debts incurred during the French-Indian war with England; the revolution in France was still to ignite in 1789 and the nightmarish threat of the Terror and the National Razor were still to come.

Copley's painting, however, almost seems to presage that nightmare still to come.  Though Copley does not show the gore of a lost limb, one can see in the lower left corner of the painting the right leg of Watson already severed and gone from the first two attacks of the shark.  The body of the young boy, draped in the position of a classical nude, lies helpless and naked, pale and almost translucent as marble, his long hair flowing out in the water.  He sees the monstrous shark coming at him from an upside down position emphasizing his helplessness.  This image of the nude body, naked against attack, indicates a dreamlike terror of being ineffectual against the forces that seek our demise; as though something terrible and threatening seeks to end us and try as we might we cannot face the foe.  It was a sense not limited to Copley's age.  The nude image of the helpless body was used in death images in the ancient world, 

and again in the images of the Deposition by Raphael

and by Caravaggio among others.

Fuseli uses a similar figure in "The Nightmare" in 1781 to depict helplessness against the forces of darkness.

Edgar Allen Poe indicates a similar helplessness in his 1843 poem "The Conqueror Worm", and Ambrose Bierce brings up such helplessness in his stories about the Civil War.  Similar helplessness runs right up into the 20th century war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" or Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana".  Are we swept up in "fortune"?  forces of nightmare beyond our control? "the gods" of ancient Greece and Rome?

Notice that the shark doesn't look like a shark in the real world.  This is probably due to Copley's unfamiliar with sharks in the wild.  Nevertheless, Copley used what was available to him.  The monster, though unsharklike, does bear a striking resemblance to images of demons in Medieval and Renaissance art; particularly Fra Angelico, Hieronymous Bosch or Pieter Bruegel - all teeth and eyes and darkness emerging out of the primordial unknown of the ocean.  Even his unsharky tale curls around the boat like Nidhoggr around the world ocean of Norse mythology.

The image of the boatswain in Copley's painting suggests a certain solace.  He stands at the prow of the boat, heedless of his own safety, like some sort of Leonidas in the gap or Horatius at the Pons Sublicius.  He is the image of human strength and courage, standing up to the forces of nightmare despite the dangers.

The entry at Wikipedia claims

The painting is romanticised: the gory detail of the injury is hidden beneath the waves, though there is a hint of blood in the water. The figure of Watson is based on the statue of the "Borghese Gladiator", by Agasias of Ephesus, in the Louvre. Other apparent influences are Renaissance art, and the ancient statue of Laocoön and his Sons, which Copley may have seen in Rome. Copley was probably also influenced by Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe, and the growing popularity of romantic painting.

The composition of the rescuers in the boat shows hints of Peter Paul Rubens's Jonah Thrown into the Sea, and both Rubens's Miraculous Draught of Fishes and Raphael's painting of the same name. The facial expressions show a marked resemblance to those in Charles Le Brun's Conférence de M. Le Brun sur l'expression générale et particulière, an influential work published in 1698...

This entry does not, however, make reference to an influence that seems obvious, namely, images of Saint Michael and Satan.  The writeup at the National Gallery of Art does make this observation, however -

The harpooner is portrayed as a secular version of Saint Michael defeating the devil or of Saint George fighting the dragon, two legends often depicted in traditional painting. The shark here incarnates evil, its open jaws recalling the gaping mouth of hell. The boat, too, appears to be modeled after those in earlier representations of the New Testament’s miraculous “draught of fishes.” 

Like Saint Michael, the boatswain, with his flowing hair and coat thrown open like a cape, is ready to dispatch the forces of evil that threaten to consume.  Yet in Copley's painting the threat is enhanced since the velocity of the shark and the nearness to its victim render the possibility of a successful rescue almost impossible.  Even if the boatswain were to stab at this point the shark already has its rows of teeth secured in the victim's flesh.  Destruction seems inevitable and the boatswain's expression of contempt seems to look away from his strike rather toward it as though contemplating some other reality beyond this world.  Such horror occurring on a day as pleasant and clear as September 11, 2001!

Particularly interesting in the painting is the choice of the West African figure next to the boatswain.  In original sketches this figure was European, white skinned and blond, just as the other figures were.  Why did Copley change the figure to a West African?  it certainly wasn't an act of inclusivity (such sentiments didn't exist in the 18th century) so another motive must be sought.  Was it an attempt at historical accuracy?  Was it a prescient choice presaging the World War of the French Revolution yet to come?  Was it to balance the other colors and figures in the work?  The only other fully erect figure in the boat, this figure clothed all in white expresses compassion as though he were a sage or magi sympathetic to the disaster about to come (his right hand extends like the Virgin Mary of the Pieta while in his left he holds the umbilical rope that drapes into the water and over the arm of the helpless Watson).

Brooks Watson, who survived the attack and went on to serve in Parliament, later commissioned the work from the American painter, Copley.  Eventually Watson bequeathed the masterpiece to Christ's Hospital in England which sold the painting to the National Gallery of Art in 1963.  It was there that I saw it in the summer of 2019 with my brother, Austin.