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Four years after he went to London, Copley painted his great Brook Watson and the Shark (see color). The painting was commissioned by Merchant Watson himself, to commemorate a leg lost in a ship's accident in Havana Harbor. Copley used newly acquired techniques in putting the picture together: instead of painting directly from models, he began with sketches of the single figures and then combined their movements as as a choreographer.
Pity, Not Mist
The canvas is monumental in composition, dramatic in detail. It speaks—screams—of fate's flashing changes. An ordinary man overboard suddenly confronts the jaws of death. No softening atmosphere mists the facts. No historical, mythologic or literary connotations blur the issue. For sheer pity and terror, the picture stands alone in its age, when art either eulogized, moralized or titillated.
Copley had invented Romantic horror-painting, but he never followed up his invention. That remained for Frenchman Theodore Gericault, whose Raft of the Medusa (see color) came 40 years later. Critics have made much of what Gericault owed to Michelangelo and Caravaggio, have tended to overlook his connection with Copley. Yet the similarity of composition (a pyramid tilted toward the horizon) and especially of spirit argues for Gericault's having known Copley's picture. Splendid though they are. both Copley's and Gericault's men-against-the-sea-scapes seem as dated today as they once were startling.
The swift, accurate camera has superceded such labored reconstructions, as photographs of the Andrea Doria disaster show.
Brook Watson and the Shark was Copley's only real contribution to European art. Actually the work of his London peers (Romney. Gainsborough. Reynolds, West) corrupted Copley's homespun realism. To compete in such fast and fashionable company, the old dog learned a pathetic array of new tricks. He kept on painting industriously until his death at 77, but his ice-clear eye gradually veiled, his granite-firm hand practiced soft flamboyance, his powers slipped away like spirits bored with too much worldliness, sick of success.