John Singleton Copley was the greatest American painter of the colonial period, celebrated for his psychologically penetrating portraits and dramatic history paintings. Born in Boston and largely self-taught, he produced remarkably assured portraits of colonial merchants and civic leaders before moving permanently to London in 1774. Watson and the Shark (1778), showing a dramatic rescue from a shark attack in Havana harbor, was a sensation at the Royal Academy — one of the first major paintings to show a Black figure as a heroic participant rather than a background presence.
