Feb

You know you’ve made it when you’re the subject of a Google Doodle

It’s a long and circuitous route from ancient Rome to the Interwebs, with stops along the way at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. Kick off Black History Month with a closer look at Edmonia Lewis and her most famous sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra.

Google Doodle showing Google log wrapped around female sculptor at work

Edmonia Lewis and her sculpture, “The Death of Cleopatra” were the featured Google Doodle February 1.

To celebrate Black History Month, the American Art Museum has launched an online exhibition of sculptor Edmonia Lewis’ work on Google Arts & Culture. To promote the exhibition, Google made Lewis and her sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra the subject of the Google Doodle on February 1.

Mary Edmonia Lewis was born in Greenbush, New York in 1844 to an African American father and Native American (Chippewa) mother. Orphaned at a young age, Lewis was raised by her mother’s nomadic family and given the name “Wildfire.” In Boston, Lewis began sculpting portraits of well-known abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips. The sale of her portrait busts of abolitionist John Brown and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the Boston hero and leader of the celebrated all-African-American 54th Regiment of the Civil War, helped finance Lewis’ first trip to Europe in 1865.

Lewis traveled to Rome, where she became acquainted with Harriet Hosmer and other American sculptors, many of whom had been drawn to Rome by the availability of fine white marble and skills of Italian stone carvers, who were often hired to transfer a sculptor’s design from a plaster model to finished marble. Lewis was unique among sculptors of her generation in Rome as she rarely employed Italian carvers and completed most of her work without assistance, in part due to her limited financial resources.

White marble sculpture of Cleopatra on throne

The Death of Cleopatra, 1876, by Edmonia Lewis

Carved in 1876, The Death of Cleopatra is one of Lewis’ most well-known works. Not long after its debut at the Philadelphia Centenntial Exhibition in 1876, it was presumed lost for nearly a century. See more of Lewis’ work and read about the interesting, and often circuitous path it took before it found its final home at SAAM in 1994 thanks in part to a Boy Scouts troop in suburban Chicago.

This is an edited version of a post originally published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s blog, Eye Level.