Cleopatra Dying. Baron Henri de Triqueti (1803-74). 1859. Carved ivory and cast bronze on a marble and ebony base, with traces of polychromy and gilding. © Victoria and Albert Museum. On show at the Henry Moore Foundation's The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 25 November 2022-26 February 2023, and reviewed here (link on this website. Photograph and caption material reproduced from exhibition press release by kind permission of the gallery.
According to the press release, "Henri Baron de Triqueti’s Cleopatra Dying 1859 – which will be loaned for the first time since its recent acquisition by the Victoria and Albert Museum – typifies not only the taste for exotic, coloured materials but also the late Victorian fascination with all things Egyptian." Cleopatra herself was a poplar subject for artists. One might add that this work also shares Victorian artists' fascination with sleeping or dead women. Cleopatra is losing consciousness, head falling back, the asp still visible by her upper arm, her basket of figs in the very moment of falling from her grasp. – Jacqueline Banerjee
Links to Related Material
- Thomas Ridgeway Gould's Cleopatra
- Laurence Alma-Tadema's Cleopatra
- Frederick Sandys's Cleopatra
- Arnold Böcklin's The Dying Cleopatra
- Egypt, Eygyptologists, and Victorian Egyptomania
- Women as Subject in Victorian Art — Representations of Women
Created 12 January 2023