Cleopatra at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, July 2003

WILLIAM WETMORE STORY
United States, Massachusetts, Salem, 1819-1895
Cleopatra, modeled 1858, carved 1860
Marble on polychrome wood platform
55 x 24 x 48 in. (139.7 x 61 x 121.9 cm)
78.3
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry M. Bateman


Raised in Boston and educated at Harvard, William Wetmore Story lived at the heart of privilege. He was friendly with the most literate and gifted of American and European society, including the Brownings, W.M. Thackeray, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Russell Lowell. By the time Story devoted his considerable energies to sculpture, he already had a successful law practice and had published poetry, essays, and the papers of his father, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. The judge's death in 1845, a subsequent commission to execute his monument, and a debilitating bout of typhoid caused Story to leave law and eventually to take up sculpture full time. He and his family settled permanently in Rome in 1856. With Cleopatra, Story directed American neoclassical sculpture away from the detachment of Grecian ideals to a new romanticism and the potential for realism and psychological drama. The work established Story as the foremost American sculptor internationally as well as in America. The sculpture is a study of Cleopatra's passion and despair as she contemplates the action that will lead to her fall. A brooding expression crosses her African features, her posture is slumped, and her outstretched hand fidgets tensely. The work captured the imagination of an educated audience that set great store by narrative subjects. Pope Pius IX so admired Cleopatra that the Roman government paid all shipping costs in order to exhibit it in 1862 at the Roman Court of the International Exposition in London, where it made Story's reputation.


Text from: collectionsonline.lacma.org/mweb/about/american_about.asp