Watson and the Shark

Copley painted Watson and the Shark twice at full size in 1778. The first canvas went to Brook Watson himself, the London merchant who as a boy had lost a leg to a shark in Havana harbour. This second one Copley kept and hung in his own London studio, where sitters and visitors could see the picture that had made his name. When he died in 1815 it passed to his son, also John Singleton Copley, a lawyer who became Lord Chancellor as Lord Lyndhurst. He gave it to a relative in Boston, probably his sister Elizabeth Greene, and so the painting crossed the Atlantic to the town Copley had left in 1774 and never saw again. A Watson and the Shark lent to the Boston Athenaeum, the city's private library and picture gallery, by a Mrs Greene in 1850 was very likely this one. In 1889 Mrs George von Lengerke Meyer, born into the Boston Appleton family, gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts. Copley's signature and the year 1778 are painted on the inside of the boat's stern.