European and American Art

The Egyptian queen Cleopatra committed suicide after her defeat and capture by the Romans. A poisonous snake was smuggled into her prison concealed in a basket of figs. In Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra this story is the basis for a moving scene between the melancholy Cleopatra, brooding over the death of her lover Antony and already resolved to take leave of the world herself, and a clownish peasant, whose clumsy speech includes comical misuses of language yet at the same time hints at the transcendence of death through immortality.

Cleopatra: Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there, That kills and pains not?
Peasant:Truly I have him, but I would not be the party that should desire you to touch him, for his biting is immortal; those that do die of it do seldom or never recover.

Delacroix' painting is based on Shakespeare's text, and its juxtaposition of the grotesque and the beautiful is a visual equivalent for the poetic language of the play.

EUGENE DELACROIX
French, 1798 - 1863
Cleopatra and the Peasant
oil on canvas, 1838
Ackland Fund, 59.15.1