In 1876, New York artist sculpted Cleopatra’s death; 100 years later, the lost artwork was discovered while being used as a horse’s gravestone

Many of history’s most beloved works still remain lost to time. From books to sculptures and even paintings, all works of art that were adored in their day are now either destroyed or impossible to find. For instance, Sophocles was known to have written over 120 plays; only 7 are known to survive to this day. Similarly, Frida Kahlo’s 1940 painting, The Wounded Table, was last exhibited in 1955 and has not been seen since. Another such lost work of art was a sculpture called The Death of Cleopatra.In a video going viral on TikTok, user Symantha Onyechi introduced viewers to the sculpture, sharing its story from being sculpted to getting lost and then finally finding a place in the museum. She revealed that the sculpture was created by a woman named Edmonia Lewis. As Onyechi described, 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 said.

Who was Edmonia Lewis?

Edmonia Lewis was born in New York in 1844, according to a report by All That’s Interesting. Due to her mixed African American and Mississauga Ojibwe heritage, she faced discrimination throughout her life and career. As she gained fame as an artist, her studio received numerous visitors, not for her art but to confirm that it was really 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 explained.The visitors came so often 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.In 1862, she was accused of poisoning two white classmates. While the charges were later dismissed due to a lack of evidence, 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 explained. “She said that ‘the land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.’”In Rome, Lewis was able to explore her craft more freely. Her work gained recognition for itself, 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

Initial reports about the whereabouts of the sculpture vary. There are claims that by 1892, it 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 favourite 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 US 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.The work eventually caught the attention 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 by themselves by covering it with a coat of white paint, which ultimately made the restoration process more difficult when the Smithsonian American Art Museum finally came to possess it 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,” shared Onyechi.However, recently Lewis’ oeuvre has been gaining renewed attention. Those interested in seeing her work can view it as part of a travelling 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 still remains out of view, art historians hope that it may soon make a public reappearance at the Smithsonian.