PARTISAN REVIEW
a nation at large, would guarantee that nation's commercial prosperity.
On the surface it is a thoroughly English picture, and yet it is thoroughly
un-English at last. For Copley, there was not enough distance between
Europe and America either to exclude or embarrass him as an artist–
there was just enough to give him a detachment which he knew how to
make the most of.
There is no doubt that
Brook Watson and the Shark
is
Copley's
masterpiece, and it is barely possible it is the greatest of all American
paintings. Several years ago when the Museum of Modern Art showed
it in its exhibition, "Romantic Painting in America," the tyranny it ex–
ercised over the imagination was so complete that one returned to it
again and again at the expense of everything else in the show. It is there–
fore a little surprising to find Mr. Flexner writing, "Even that fierce
rendition of terror,
Brook Watson and the Shark,
is fundamentally lit–
eral-minded. Far from frightening us with imaginative symbols, Copley
makes us feel that we are actual spectators of the tragedy as it oc–
curred." At one level this remark is true, but it too easily assumes that
an image cannot be simultaneously literal and symbolic. Actually, the
impact of this picture is due to its inexhaustible capacity to take inter–
pretation. There is more than mere literalness (however brilliantly
executed) in the mysterious suggestiveness of the open jaws of the
shark, in the ghostly nakedness of the man floating through the green
water, in the highly conventionalized, almost ritualistic gestures of the
men in the boat, and in the enigmatic repose of the negro, whose ex–
tended arm, raised in a kind of benediction, carries into the foreground
of the action the weight and solidity of the great vessels riding at anchor
in the harbor. Not until Melville would an American artist produce any–
thing of comparable imaginative power. The important thing to remark
here is that although the directness of vision is insistently American it
is realized with a maturity possible only as long as an American could
function without nervousness in the presence of the European tradition.
The figures at first seem wooden and awkward (this was Copley's first
important London picture), but his understanding of what could
be
achieved in terms of that very defect (and perhaps only in those terms)
makes the picture a wonderful success-and it is an understanding that
Allston's contemporaries would have been incapable of.
Allston was born forty-one years after Copley, while the American
Revolution was still in progress: consequently, he grew up in an environ–
ment from which the absence of good paintings to study was the least
of the difficulties confronting the American artist. The problem was no
longer the simple one of going to Europe to study or live: it had become
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