19th Century Artists
Mary Edmonia Lewis
Born: Greenbush, New York 1844
Died: London, England 1907
Title:<marble sculpture: Death of Cleopatra>
Edmonia Lewis was the first professional African Native American sculptor in the mid-1800s.
Lewis portrayed Cleopatra in the moment after her death, after the snake’s venom had taken hold, wearing her royal attire, majestically resting on her throne.
The identical sphinx heads bordering the throne represent the twins she bore with the Roman General Marc Antony.
This piece was first displayed to great praise at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia Pennsylvania in 1876.
However, not long after its debut, Death of Cleopatra was presumed lost for almost a century.
It eventually reappeared at a junkyard in the 1980s, and in 1994 the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois gifted the sculpture to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC where it is currently on display.
Another sculpture by Edmonia Lewis
Title: <Old Arrow Maker a marble sculpture>.
It brings to life a passage from the Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
in which the female character plaits “mats of flags and rushes” while her father makes “arrow-heads of jasper.”
They both look up to greet the young girl’s suitor, Hiawatha, who brings a deer as a token of marriage.
Ms. Lewis’ father was a free black man and her mother a Chippewa Indian.
She lived with her mother’s traveling tribe until she was twelve years old.
Lewis often created sculptures of Native Americans, possibly in memory of her mother who was from the Ojibwa (pronounced O-JEE-BWA) tribe.
