The Triumph of Cleopatra
The Triumph of Cleopatra is an oil painting by English artist William Etty. It was first exhibited in 1821, and is now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight across the River Mersey from Liverpool. It is based loosely on Plutarch’s Life of Antony as repeated in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleoopatra.
About The Triumph of Cleopatra in brief
The Triumph of Cleopatra is an oil painting by English artist William Etty. It was first exhibited in 1821, and is now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight across the River Mersey from Liverpool. Etty had become widely respected among staff and students at the Royal Academy of Arts in the 1810s. Despite having exhibited at every Summer Exhibition since 1811 he attracted little commercial or critical interest. In 1820 he exhibited The Coral Finder, which showed nude figures on a gilded boat. This painting attracted the attention of Sir Francis Freeling, who commissioned a similar painting on a more ambitious scale. It is based loosely on Plutarch’s Life of Antony as repeated in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleoopatra. The painting was an immediate success, making Etty famous almost overnight. He devoted much of the next decade to creating further history paintings containing nude figures, becoming renowned for his combination of nudity and moral messages. He was born in York in 1787, the son of a miller and baker. He showed artistic promise from an early age, but his family were financially insecure, and at the age of 12 he left school to become an apprentice printer in Hull. After a year spent studying under the renowned portrait painter Thomas Lawrence, Etty returned to the Academy, drawing in the life class and copying other paintings.
His first painting, Telemachus Rescues Antiope from the Fury of the Wild Boar, was finally accepted for the Summer Exhibition in 1811. However, he had little commercial success and generated little interest over the next few years. At the 1820 Summer Exhibition Etty exhibited Venus and her Youthful Satellites Arriving at the Isle of Paphos. Strongly inspired by Titian, the Coral Finder depicts Venus Victrix lying nude in a golden boat, surrounded by scantily-clad attendants. The picture was sold at exhibition to piano manufacturer Thomas Tomkinson for £30 (it was later sold for £50). Etty then painted a picture of Cleo in Cilicia based on the composition of The Coral Finder, and took the opportunity provided by Freeling to paint his own picture of her based on Cleo’s Arrival in Tarsus. The Triumph ofCleopatra illustrates a scene from Plutarch and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleo, Queen of Egypt, travels to TarsUS aboard a grand ship to cement an alliance with the Roman general Mark Antony. It shows a huge group of people in various states of undress, gathering on the bank to watch the ship’s arrival.
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This page is based on the article The Triumph of Cleopatra published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
