When Cleopatra Died Again

Edmonia Lewis, the first African American sculptor in the classical mode, was shockingly talented

THE CENTENNIAL exhibition of 1876 was a massive celebration that sought to promote patriotic unity in the wake of the Civil War, drawing nearly ten million visitors to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Grounds. Among the 500-plus sculptors with work on view, only one was Black: Edmonia Lewis.

Her Death of Cleopatra established Lewis as one of the country’s premier sculptors and, the scholar Naurice Frank Woods Jr. wrote in 2009, enabled Lewis “to lay a solid foundation for women of color to begin ascending in artistic relevance in a profession then largely dominated by skeptical, unsupportive, and inflexible white males.”

Lewis gave varying accounts of the circumstances of her birth. Today, historians believe she was born in 1844 in upstate New York to a free Black man named Lewis and a Chippewa woman, who gave her daughter the first name of Wildfire. Both parents died before the child turned 5, so she lived with her maternal aunts near Niagara Falls. In 1859, she enrolled at Oberlin College under the name Edmonia, her education financed by the fortune her older brother Samuel had earned in California during the gold rush. At Oberlin, “nascent signs of her artistic skills were revealed,” writes art historian Charmaine A. Nelson. Yet her time there was brief. In January 1862, Lewis’ two white roommates accused her of poisoning their wine with Spanish fly, a toxin produced by the blister beetle, often used in those days as an aphrodisiac. News of the charge spread through the town, and before her arrest and trial, Lewis was brutally beaten outside her home by a mob of white vigilantes. She was acquitted, but a year later was accused of stealing art supplies and expelled.

Frederick Douglass encouraged her to settle in Boston, where she fell in with the well-known abolitionists Lydia Child and William Lloyd Garrison— and the acclaimed sculptor Edward Augustus Brackett, who became a mentor. Lewis’ skills matured, and she supported herself by selling clay cameo portraits and busts of popular figures such as Garrison and John Brown before decamping to Europe in 1865.

Lewis visited London, Paris and Florence before settling in Rome, where she joined a group of expatriate American sculptors including William Wetmore Story and Harriet Hosmer.