Passage II

Edmonia Lewis and Her Marble Cleopatra

In 1988, during a routine inspection of a salvage yard in the Chicago area, firefighter Harold Adams made a discovery that helped solve a 100-year-old mystery. Amid the debris, he came face to face with a monumental statue of a queen in the salvage yard. The work of art had such a commanding presence that he felt compelled to bring it to the attention of people who might be able to identify, repair, and permanently protect it.

Eventually, the statues identity emerged. The woman depicted was none other than the Egyptian ruler Cleopatra. The artist was Edmonia Lewis, born in 1840 to an Ojibway mother and African American father. As a young person, Lewis had studied at Oberlin College before moving to Boston and later Rome, where she joined a community of American sculptors living abroad. Carving Italian marble by hand, Lewis portrayed Cleopatra taking, her last breath. The Death of Cleopatra was hailed by many critics as the most impressive sculpture at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the event for which it had been created. (22)

Shortly after the exposition, the statue fell into mysterious circumstances that frustrated the art lovers who tried over the years to locate it. Decades passed before the story of it's journey were pieced together. For a while, the marble queen had resided in a Chicago saloon. Later, it marked the grave of a racehorse named Cleopatra. By the time Adams stumbled upon the two-ton statue, it was chipped, cracked, and covered with graffiti. Until it could be shipped to restoration experts, Lewis's masterpiece was stored—alongside paper turkeys, tinsel streamers, and half-empty cans of paint—in a back room somewhere.

The Death of Cleopatra returned to the limelight in the 1990s when, after being meticulously restored, the sculpture went on display at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. Where it continues to inspire renewed appreciation all over again for a bold and gifted American artist, Edmonia Lewis.