The Death of Cleopatra by Edmonia Lewis - 1876 - 160.0 x 79.4 x 116.8 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum The Death of Cleopatra by Edmonia Lewis - 1876 - 160.0 x 79.4 x 116.8 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Death of Cleopatra

marble • 160.0 x 79.4 x 116.8 cm.
  • Edmonia Lewis - c. July 4, 1844 - September 17, 1907 Edmonia Lewis 1876

This is the moment when the Black History Month of February meets the upcoming Women's History Month of March.  : )

This sculpture was made by Edmonia Lewis, the first professional African American sculptor, who was born in Ohio or New York in 1843 or 1845. Her father was a free African American and her mother a Chippewa Indian. Orphaned before she was five, Lewis lived with her mother’s nomadic tribe until she was twelve years old. Her biography is amazing, we highly recommend that you read our article on her. Anyway, she was highly motivated to become a sculptor and she made it. Unfortunately, most of Lewis’s sculptures have not survived.

Cleopatra (69–30 BCE), the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 to 30 BCE, is often best known for her dramatic suicide, allegedly from the fatal bite of a poisonous snake. Here, Edmonia Lewis portrayed Cleopatra in the moment after her death, wearing her royal attire, in majestic repose on a throne. The identical sphinx heads flanking the throne represent the twins she bore with Roman general Marc Antony, while the hieroglyphics on the side have no meaning. Lewis was working at a time when Neoclassicism was a popular artistic style that favored classical, Biblical, or literary themes—thus Cleopatra was a common subject. Unlike her contemporaries who often depicted an idealized Cleopatra merely contemplating suicide, Lewis showed the queen’s death more realistically, after the asp’s venom had taken hold—an attribute viewed as "ghastly" and "absolutely repellant" in its day. Despite this, the piece was first exhibited to great acclaim at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 and critics raved that it was the most impressive American sculpture in the show. Not long after its debut, however, Death of Cleopatra was presumed lost for almost a century—appearing at a Chicago saloon, marking a horse’s grave at a suburban racetrack, and eventually reappearing at a salvage yard in the 1980s. 

P.S. If you would like to learn more about women artists, don't miss our Women Artists notebook.