Volume 37, Number 14 · September 27, 1990
Painting the Unpaintable
By Richard Dorment
Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710–1940
by Guy C. McElroy, with an essay by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Bedford Arts/The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 190 pp., $50.00
The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century
by Albert Boime
Smithsonian Institution Press, 256 pp., $24.95 (paper)
In 1778 a prosperous London merchant named Brook Watson commissioned John Singleton Copley to illustrate a traumatic incident in his youth. While swimming in Havana harbor in 1749, the young man was mauled by a shark and lost his leg. The story of his rescue, which Watson must have relived in his mind every day of his life and retold almost as often, is the subject of the picture now known as Watson and the Shark, which, for reasons that will soon be clear, is discussed at length in Albert Boime's The Art of Exclusion.
Review, 3947 words
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