Edmonia Lewis' 1876 sculpture The Death of Cleopatra received critical acclaim, but the work of art — and the artist herself — were then forgotten for over a century.
Public DomainThe Death of Cleopatra depicts the queen moments after her suicide by asp.
Many of history’s most beloved and important works have been lost to time.
Countless books, films, and works of art that were adored in their day are now destroyed or impossible to find. For example, while Sophocles was known to have written over 120 plays, only seven survive to this day. And Frida Kahlo’s 1940 painting, The Wounded Table, was last exhibited in 1955, but it has not been seen since.
One of these lost works was a sculpture called The Death of Cleopatra. At least, it was lost — until a strange series of events brought the sculpture and the artist behind it back into the limelight.
Who Was Edmonia Lewis?
In a video with over 94,000 views, TikTok user Symantha Onyechi (@ooopolish) introduces viewers to a sculpture: The Death of Cleopatra, which was created by a woman named Edmonia Lewis.
The sculpture is immediately striking. As Onyechi tells it, the sculpture shows Cleopatra “moments after her suicide.”
“Instead of showing her beautiful and peacefully asleep, [Lewis] decided to carve her dead, still seated on the throne, showing that she still had control of her fate until the very end,” the TikToker says.
But who was the sculptor behind this piece?
Edmonia Lewis was born in New York in 1844. Due to her mixed African American and Mississauga Ojibwe heritage, she faced discrimination throughout her life and career. As her fame as an artist grew, her studio received many visitors — not for viewers to see the artist at work, but to verify that it really was Lewis doing the sculpting.
“They couldn’t believe that a woman like her could create these massive marble sculptures with so much detail and realism,” Onyechi explains.
In fact, this became such a common occurrence that Lewis went out of her way to work in front of others and be seen with tools in her hands.
Lewis had studied art at Oberlin Collegiate Institute, the school that would become Oberlin College, in the early 1860s. But her time there was cut short after two horrifying incidents.
Public DomainEdmonia Lewis was largely forgotten after her death in 1907, but there has recently been renewed interest in her work.
In 1862, Lewis was accused of poisoning two white classmates. The charges were later dismissed for a lack of evidence, but as news about the event spread, Lewis was kidnapped and brutally assaulted by a white mob.
“A few years later, she left the United States and moved to Rome,” Onyechi explains. “She said that ‘the land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.'”
In Rome, Lewis was able to better explore her craft. Her work became popular, depicting “emancipation, freedom, Native American life, and Black history,” according to Onyechi.
Then, in 1876, Edmonia Lewis completed The Death of Cleopatra, a massive marble sculpture depicting the moments after the famed queen’s suicide. The sculpture received considerable attention at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and the 1878 Chicago Interstate Exposition — but then it seemingly vanished.
The Fate Of The Death Of Cleopatra Sculpture
Initial reports about the whereabouts of the sculpture are confusing. There are claims that, by 1892, it had somehow ended up in a saloon.
A short time later, it came into the possession of a notorious gambler and racehorse owner named “Blind John” Condon. He opted to use the sculpture as the grave marker for his favorite horse, Cleopatra, placing the sculpture near the grandstand of his race track in the Forest Park suburb of Chicago.
Over the years, the site changed, but The Death of Cleopatra remained in place. When the race track transformed into a golf course, the sculpture was used as a target. And after the U.S. Navy purchased the land to build a torpedo factory in the early years of World War II, Lewis’ sculpture was moved to a salvage yard.
Public DomainThe Harlem Race Track in Forest Park, Illinois, in 1901.
The work of art eventually caught the eye of Harold Adams, a retired firefighter and Boy Scout troop leader. “[T]he minute I saw her, I knew that statue was something beautiful,” Adams told the Chicago Tribune in 1988. “She was like a big white ghost out there between all that heavy machinery and crying out to be saved.”
Adams’ troop tried to clean up the damaged sculpture themselves by covering it with a coat of white paint — which only made the restoration process more difficult when the Smithsonian American Art Museum finally came into possession of the piece in 1994.
Even once the sculpture was found, Edmonia Lewis remained largely forgotten. After her death in 1907, “her studio wasn’t preserved, many of her works disappeared, and for years even her burial site was unknown,” details Onyechi.
Recently, however, Lewis’ oeuvre has been the center of renewed attention. Now, those interested in seeing her work can view it as part of a traveling exhibition. “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone” will be open at the Georgia Museum of Art and then the North Carolina Museum of Art from August 2026 until July 2027.
While The Death of Cleopatra is not currently on view, art historians hope that it may soon make a public reappearance at the Smithsonian.
All That’s Interesting reached out to Onyechi via email and Instagram direct message.
After reading about Edmonia Lewis and The Death of Cleopatra, discover the mysteries that lie beneath the paint of the Mona Lisa. Then, take a deep dive into the life of Cleopatra, the queen who inspired Lewis’ iconic work.
