A shark lunges from the water toward a boy already missing part of his leg, while a crew of sailors scrambles to pull him out. This scene is not invented. It really happened.
What you're looking at
John Singleton Copley painted this dramatic rescue in 1778, decades after the actual event. In 1749, 14-year-old Brook Watson was swimming alone in Havana harbor when a shark struck him twice — first stripping flesh from his calf, then severing his foot at the ankle — before sailors beat it off with a boat hook on its third attempt and pulled him from the water. His leg was later amputated below the knee. He survived, going on to become a successful merchant and eventually Lord Mayor of London.
A survivor who commissioned his own near-death moment
Watson commissioned this very painting from Copley in 1778, twenty-five years after the attack, to memorialize the event that nearly killed him and the men who saved his life. He kept it for the rest of his life; when he died in 1807 he bequeathed it to Christ's Hospital, the London charity school he had once attended, and the National Gallery of Art acquired it from the school in 1963. Copley builds the whole composition around tension and rescue rather than gore: the shark's open jaws on one side, the reaching, straining sailors on the other, and Watson's pale, exposed body caught helplessly in between. It reads almost like a religious rescue scene, with the small boat crew as the saving grace.
Copley, an American-born painter who had settled in London a few years earlier, had never seen Havana harbor or the actual attack, so the scene is a reconstruction built from Watson's own account and from prints of the harbor rather than a firsthand record — but the core facts of the attack, and Watson's survival and later career, are documented history. Copley went on to paint two further versions of the scene for himself and other patrons; this one, now at the National Gallery of Art, is the original Watson commissioned.
One detail to look for
Look at Watson's leg, or rather what's missing from it. Copley paints his lower leg already gone at the exact instant sailors drive the shark off on its third and final attempt — the climax of an ordeal that had already begun before the canvas's frozen moment.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original — 182.1 x 229.7 cm — so what you're hanging is honestly scaled to the painting Copley made. Shop the canvas print.