William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra

[0:00] [music]

Dr. Beth Harris: [0:05] We’re in the beautiful galleries at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. We’re looking at an interesting sculpture of Cleopatra by an American artist, conceived before the Civil War. The first marble version is created during the Civil War, and the version that we’re looking at is from 1865 at the conclusion of the Civil War. It’s really interesting to think about this sculpture in that context.

Tyler Green: [0:30] It’s by William Wetmore Story, whose first conception of this work was made in Europe in 1858, in clay. Story first exhibits it in 1862 in London at the Great Exposition, at a time when it was really important to the Union that England not support or formally recognize the Confederacy.

[0:51] The other versions after that first one were all made in ’65 or later, so at the end of the war or afterward. Cleopatra was the last active ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt. She was a descendant of Ptolemy I Soter, who was a Macedonian Greek general, and we don’t know who her mother was. The reason that’s relevant to us is there’s no clear consensus on whether or not her mother was African or whether Cleopatra had any African ancestry.

Dr. Harris: [1:19] For decades, even, in fact till very recently, the question of Cleopatra’s skin color has been something that both historians and the public have been interested in.

Tyler: [1:30] If we think of her as being Greek, it’s possible to understand her as having been culturally constructed as white.

Dr. Harris: [1:35] On the other hand, Egypt is in Africa.

Tyler: [1:37] Is she, perhaps, for Story, a European — read white — ruler of Africans, what could have been understood in the context of the late 1850s as a questioning of the potential of Black men and women for self-sufficiency?

[1:54] There is a major debate across 19th century America about whether men and women who are not culturally constructed as being white have the capacity to function and contribute to a republican system such as that in the United States. One way of thinking about this Story is that in presenting a European ruler of Egyptians, maybe he’s engaging that debate with ambiguity.

Dr. Harris: [2:19] It’s a tour de force of sculpture: the carving of the drapery, the way that these lovely folds that remind us of classical drapery hang over her belt, the way that the drapery makes these lovely complicated folds over her right shoulder, and then this Egyptian headdress. We’re reminded of how she commits suicide by the bite of a snake by the appearance of a snake along the hem of her garment.

Tyler: [2:44] The other thing that’s going on in 1858 of course is it’s clear to everyone in American polity, in American culture, that the Civil War is inevitable. American artists have been engaging with this idea of the inevitability of schism for a decade at this point.

Dr. Harris: [2:57] This question of what will happen when the millions of people who are enslaved become free.

Tyler: [3:05] In that context, we could consider Story as asking, “Are Black men and women prepared to be freedmen? If suddenly there are millions of freedmen in the United States, who will lead them? What capacity do they have to lead themselves?”

Dr. Harris: [3:19] I think it’s really important to see this against a racist backdrop that is putting forward ideas about African Americans being not human in the same way that white people are. It’s interesting to me that these questions are being played out in American sculpture often with white bodies in white marble. We could think, for example, of Hiram Powers’ “Greek Slave.”

Tyler: [3:43] It won’t be until very late ’62 or 1863 that you have major sculptures of recognizably Black figures in American art.

[3:51] [music]

William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra (1862 version) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra (1865 version) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

William Wetmore Story’s sculpture of the Libyan Sibyl (1860–61) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860); a good friend of Story’s and fellow expatriate living in Rome, Hawthorne included the story of the sculptor creating the first version of Cleopatra in his famous gothic romance novel.

Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire, “William Wetmore Story’s Nubian Cleopatra: Egypt and Slavery in 19th-Century America” in Cleopatra Reassessed, British Museum Ocassional Papers 2003, pp. 113–17.

Margaret and Martha Malamud, “The Petrification of Cleopatra in Nineteenth Century Art,” Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, vol. 28 no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2020), pp. 31–51.

Charmaine Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

More Smarthistory images...

Key points

• William Wetmore Story’s marble sculpture of Cleopatra was initially conceived in clay in 1858, three years before the start of the United States Civil War. Story exhibited his first marble version of the sculpture in London in 1862, just a few months before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. He completed a second, modified marble version in 1865, the year the war ended and the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, abolishing slavery across the country. Story made a number of additional marble copies of this second version in the years following the war, during the Reconstruction period.
• In the 19th century, an ongoing debate about the racial identity of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt (ruled 51–30 B.C.E.), was folded into larger debates about slavery in the United States. In particular, her heritage was referenced in arguments made by white people regarding the physical and intellectual capacities of Black people for self-sufficiency.
• Story positioned himself as an abolitionist, and he published letters in England (1861) and the United States (1862) that publicly outlined his support for the U.S. cause and his rejection of slavery. He even called another of his sculptures, the Libyan Sibyl (1860–61), his “anti-slavery sermon in stone.” Like most other American Neoclassical sculptors working in the mid-to-late 19th century, however, Story addressed issues of race with ambiguity, using the form of white marble female bodies that largely conformed to European standards of beauty.

More to think about

1. How does the chronology of Story’s work on Cleopatra and of the Civil War (see key idea #1 above) inform your understanding of the sculpture’s symbolism?
2. How might Story’s portrayal of Cleopatra be read as helpful in the U.S. government’s effort to persuade the British government not to support the Confederacy?

The following quotes from the period may provide additional context and perspectives that will enrich class discussion about these questions. The first three quotes specifically refer to Story’s Cleopatra.

“Some years ago, when visiting Rome, I related Sojourner [Truth]’s history to Mr. Story at a breakfast at his house. Already had his mind begun to turn to Egypt in search of a type of art which should represent a larger and more vigorous development of nature than the cold elegance of Greek lines. His glorious Cleopatra was then in process of evolution… The history of Sojourner Truth worked in his mind and led him into the deeper recesses of the African nature… A few days after, he told me that he had conceived the idea of a statue which he should call the Libyan Sibyl… We hope to see the day when copies both of the Cleopatra and the Libyan Sibyl shall adorn the Capitol at Washing­ton.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, The Libyan Sybil, The Atlantic Monthly (April 1863), 473–81

“The sculptor had not shunned to give the full Nubian lips, and other characteristics of the Egyptian physiognomy… In a word, all Cleopatra—fierce, voluptuous, passionate, tender, wicked, terrible, and full of poisonous and rapturous enchantment—was kneaded into what, only a week or two before, had been a lump of wet clay from the Tiber.”

From “Chapter XIV ‘Cleopatra” in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 1860 Note: Hawthorne, a good friend of Story’s and fellow expatriate living in Rome, included the story of the sculptor creating the first version of Cleopatra in his famous gothic romance novel.

“We may ethnologically object that Cleopatra, sprung from Hellenic blood, could not be African in type. Still it is a generous idea, growing out of the spirit of the age—the uplifting of downtrodden races to an equality of chances in life with the most favored—to bestow upon one of Africa’s daughters the possibility of the intellectual powers and physical attractions of the Grecian siren.”

James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea: Sculpture, Painting and Architec­ture in America (New York, 1865), 281–82.

“A capital error …  is the idea that cultivation, through a series of generations, can expand the defective brains, develop the intellectual faculties of the Negro Races, and thus raise them by degrees to the full standard of excellence which belongs to the Caucasian Races: that they can, in a word, be fully civilized, and fitted for self-government, in its highest and most complicated forms … their physical type is peculiar; their grade of intellect is greatly inferior; they are utterly wanting in moral and physical energy.”

Josiah Nott, An essay on the natural history of mankind, viewed in connection with negro slavery: delivered before the Southern Rights Association, 14th December, 1850 (published as pamphlet in 1851, p. 15–16)

“For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free colored person about them.”

Houston Hartsfield Holloway, a freedman reflecting on the experience of emancipation in his autobiography, written 1903–13

Causes of the U.S. Civil War: Images in a Divided World