The Death of Cleopatra
Carved 1876
Edmonia Lewis depicts Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt (69-30 BCE) who chose to commit suicide rather than submit to Roman forces. Cleopatra was a popular subject among nineteenth-century sculptors, who favored historical, biblical and literary themes and typically showed the Egyptian queen contemplating suicide. In contrast to her contemporaries, Lewis dramatically portrays Cleopatra dying on her throne, moments after being bitten by a poisonous snake. Some critics regarded this level of realism as “ghastly” and “absolutely repellant” (William J. Clark, Great American Sculpture, 1878), while others highly praised the sculpture when it was shown at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, deeming it the most impressive American sculpture in the exhibition.
Not long after its debut, Death of Cleopatra was presumed lost for nearly a century. In 1892 it was reported on display in a saloon; sometime later the owner of the Harlem Racetrack (in what is now the suburb of Forest Park, west of Chicago) placed the sculpture there to mark the grave of the owner's favorite racehorse, "Cleopatra." After the racetrack closed, the sculpture remained on the site, which over the years became a golf course and later a munitions factory during World War II. When the Postal Service built a bulk mail center on the land in 1972, the sculpture was moved to a salvage yard. A fire inspector discovered the statue in the early 1980s and enlisted his son's Boy Scouts troop to clean and paint it. In 1985 the statue was given to the Historical Society of Forest Park, which in turn donated it to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1994.
