Ambushed by black history

My wife and I recently took a day off from black history (or so we thought) to attend a talk at Croydon Parish church about the history of the building. Although we have lived in Croydon for a combined total of over 110 years we had, somewhat shamefully, never actually visited the Minster.

The Minster sits beside a couple of busy main roads. They say the camera doesn’t lie but with careful choice of angles it can certainly be encouraged to fib a bit!

What a charming rural vision – hopefully you can’t see the gigantic crane artfully concealed behind the tree and you certainly won’t be able to hear the traffic thundering by!

The talk by David Morgan was extremely informative and even people attending who already knew a great deal about the church learnt new things, we certainly did! It was at the end of the visit that we were unexpectedly ambushed by a little piece of black history.

David had left out some pictures that provided context to his talk. One of them featured a painting by John Singleton Copley, who is buried at the Minster and who David had spoken about during his talk. You should be able to see why this caught our attention.

Although the ‘subject’ of the painting is Brook Watson, the youth flailing in the water, and, yes, ‘the shark’, a black man is given a very prominent position and the eye is immediately drawn to him. The National Gallery of Art (Washington) comments that his ‘prominent position in the picture and sympathetic rendering were extraordinary for the time.'^[1]https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/copley-watson-and-the-shark.html

We felt prompted into some research with the following questions in mind:

• who was Brook Watson?
• Who was John Singleton Copley?
• Who is the black figure given such a prominent place in the painting?

Brook Watson

The painting depicts an actual event in the life of Brook Watson. Born in Plymouth, Devon, in 1735, he was orphaned at the age of six and sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Boston, Massachusetts. Later he became a crewman on one of his uncle’s ships and, at the age of 14, he took the unwise decision to go for a dip in the harbour at Havana, Cuba. He was attacked by a shark which on its second attack took off his right foot, it was coming back to finish the job when a group of Brook’s shipmates combined to fend off the shark and rescue young Brook.

Watson survived the attack and, although his right leg had to be amputated below the knee, after three months convalescing in Havana he was able to carry on with, what turned out to be, a very successful, if not altogether blameless, life.

He clearly must have had a good head for business as by the age of 15 he had a role in supplying provisions to the British Army at Fort Lawrence in Nova Scoria and he quickly advanced to become a commissary, a key role in the supply chain that he fulfilled for General Wolfe at the Siege of Louisbourg. In 1758 he returned to London to carry on his career as a merchant, something he did with great success.

On her visit to London in 1773 the acclaimed black American poet, Phillis Wheatley, was introduced to Watson and he gave her an edition of ‘Paradise Lost’ by John Milton. On her return to America Phillis was granted her freedom and she suggests that her ‘friends in England’ played a part in this:

was presented with a Folio Edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, printed on a Silver Type, so call’d from its elegance, (I suppose) By Mr.Brook Watson Mercht. whose Coat of Arms is prefix’d. — Since my return to America my Master, has at the desire of my friends in England given me my freedom. The Instrument is drawn, so as to secure me and my property from the hands of the Executrs. adminstrators, &c. of my master, & secure whatsoever should be given me as my Own. ^[2]https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=771&img_step=1&mode=transcript#page1

In spite of his small gesture, which he could well afford, we gain a rather different insight into Watson’s character from an American businessman and politician, Ethan Allen, who accompanied him on a voyage to England in 1775. Allen wrote that he:

“was put under the power of an English Merchant from London, whose name was Brook Watson: a man of malicious and cruel disposition, and who was probably excited, in the exercise of his malevolence, by a junto of tories, who sailed with him to England …”^[3]Allen, Ethan (1838). A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity, Written by Himself, 3rd. ed., Burlington, Vermont.

Watson was one of the founding members of Lloyds (and later became its chairman), a banking and insurance company. The company directly profited from the slave trade as it insured the ships that transported enslaved people across the Atlantic. Furthermore, Watson wrote in 1789 that he supported the slave trade and that it needed to remain in place for the benefit of the economies of the colonies.^[4]https://philliswheatleyldn.wixsite.com/philliswheatleylondo/post/sir-brook-watson

Watson was appointed to be the Director of the Bank of England in 1784, he was a Member of Parliament from 1784 to 1793, became Lord Mayor of London in 1796 and was granted the title of Baronet in 1803.

A stellar career but of course it was built on rotten foundations. Perhaps he did not personally own slaves (his personal and business papers have not survived so we do not know) but Watson is described repeatedly as a ‘merchant’ and there really can be little doubt that, either directly through personal investment in the voyages of slave ships, or indirectly, through his role as one of the founders of Lloyds, he owed his wealth and position to the trade in enslaved people or in the goods their labour produced.

John Singleton Copley

Copley was born in Boston, Massachusetts in either 1737 or 1738. His father died when John was young and it was probably his stepfather, an engraver and painter, who taught him the rudiments of his art. Young John quickly excelled and even while still a teenager became a sought after painter of portraits in the Boston area and beyond.

But these were dangerous times in Boston, were you a Loyalist (on the side of the British colonial authorities), or a supporter of independence?  Copley’s family were mostly in the Loyalist camp (his father-in-law was one of the merchants who had a consignment of his tea dumped into Boston harbour during the so called Boston Tea Party) and Copley himself was threatened by a mob who suspected him of sheltering a Loyalist. Copley himself had some sympathy with the cause of independence but generally kept his head down.

Knowledge of Copley’s ability spread and he was urged to move to England which he eventually did in 1774.  He had immediate success and ‘Watson and the Shark’ was just one of many impressive paintings he made in these early years in London. In 1783 he was elected as a full member of the Royal Academy and members of the royal family were among those who sat for him.

In later years his powers declined and he increasingly relied on loans from friends to maintain his home in London’s fashionable Hanover Square. He died on 9^th September 1815 and was buried in Croydon Minster.

The black sailor

As is usually the case in situations like this we are not going to be able to identify this black sailor.

But was he painted from ‘life’, in other words did an actual black man have his image painted by the artist, or is he simply a generic ‘black man’ who existed only in the artist’s imagination? In the absence of documentary evidence we can only go by the look and feel of the image. To our eyes this is not a cartoon caricature (unlike the shark – Copley had never seen an actual shark and it shows!). Copley, based in Boston, Massachusetts for many years would certainly have seen black men (and, following his marriage, he had enslaved people in his own household in Boston), and of course there was a significant black population in London too.

The outcome of the American War resulted in the establishment of a large American loyalist community, both white and black.^[5]https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Population-history-of-london.jsp#a1760-1815 The best estimate of London’s black population at this time is around 5,000 to 10,000 out of a total population that was probably still a little under a million. Edward Long, a leading pro-slavery campaigner, suggested a figure of 45,000, a deliberately inflated number designed to frighten the English into believing they could be swamped by idle blacks freed from enslavement.

The case that Copley knew a black man and used him as the basis for this painting is strengthened by another painting of his.

This is a very lifelike representation of the face of a black man and must surely have been based on a living person known to Copley. His art was commended for his ‘startling likenesses of persons and things’ and this is a fine example.

Whether a black sailor was involved in the actual rescue  of Watson is unknown, this is after all an artefact, a painting created many years after the event, not a photograph. Various sources state that infra red analysis of the painting shows that the black man in the shark painting was originally painted as having blond hair and fair skin. We cannot know what prompted Copley to paint out the original white sailor and replace him with the black man we see in the finished picture but it is true to say that everything that appears in a painting is there because the artist wanted it to be there, the presence of this black man was the result of a very conscious decision.^[6]https://artincontext.org/watson-and-the-shark/ It has been suggested that Copley was making a point in favour of the abolition of slavery, after all, it is the black sailor who is holding the rope that could, literally, be Watson’s lifeline.

Copley was living in London at the time and would have seen black people as he went about his business either as servants in the houses he visited whilst doing his social rounds or destitute on the streets of the city. The ‘black poor’ in London reached the ‘something must be done’ stage in 1785 just a few years after this painting was made and in 1786 several hundred ‘volunteers’ were sent to establish a colony in what is now Sierra Leone, an ill-considered venture which led to almost all of the settlers dying within the first two years of reaching Africa. The names of those who were candidates for the venture can be seen on lists that are held at the National Archives in Kew.

Although we are stepping beyond the bounds of ‘history’ here and into the territory of ‘speculation’, it is certainly possible that the man who served as the model for Copley’s black sailor was among those on these lists.

The ‘Head of a Negro’ wasn’t the only painting in which Copley placed a black man at the centre of the action. In ‘The Death of Major Peirson’ (1783) a black servant of the Major is seen firing a rifle at those who have killed his master. The black servant of auctioneer James Christie (founder of Christie’s auction house) was the model for the figure in the painting.^[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Major_Peirson,_6_January_1781

Conclusion

Portraying black men in such prominent roles really was exceptionally unusual at the time these paintings were made and we can’t help but believe that ‘The head of a Negro’ painting brings us face to face with one of the black men who lived in London in the 1770s and 1780s.