The Death of Cleopatra
Edmonia Lewis (about 1844-1907) · carved 1876
Not currently on display. Second-floor galleries for eighteenth to early twentieth century art closed on 22 September 2025 for reinstallation and are scheduled to reopen on 6 November 2026; the museum's collection page listed this work as not on view during the closure. Confirm the gallery placement after reopening.
Cleopatra slumps on her throne, head fallen back, one arm hanging loose, the asp still in her hand. She wears her royal diadem and a robe that falls in deep folds to the ground, and the throne is carved with sphinx heads and Egyptian ornament. Most sculptors of the nineteenth century showed the queen in the moment of decision, contemplating the snake. Edmonia Lewis chose the moment just after death, and she did not soften it. Contemporaries found the realism shocking; one critic called it absolutely repellent, and another said it was the most remarkable piece of sculpture in the American section of the exhibition.
Lewis was the first sculptor of African American and Native American descent to win an international reputation. Born in New York State to a Black father and an Ojibwe mother, she studied at Oberlin and Boston and moved to Rome in 1866, where she carved her own marble rather than leaving it to studio assistants, partly because she could not afford them and partly to answer those who doubted a Black woman could do the work. Look at the confident handling of the drapery and the way the weight of the body pulls the figure down and to one side, a study in collapse that still reads as regal.
The sculpture was shown at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 and then disappeared. It surfaced in a Chicago saloon, then marked the grave of a racehorse named Cleopatra at a suburban racetrack, then sat in a scrapyard and a shopping mall storage lot, where a Boy Scout troop painted it in bright colours. A dentist and a local historical society rescued it, and after conservation the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois gave it to the Smithsonian in 1994. Its survival is nearly as remarkable as the woman who made it.
Did You Know? For years the statue marked the grave of a racehorse called Cleopatra at a track outside Chicago.
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