Getty Museum
The Banquet of Cleopatra
Creator
Gerard HoetDutch Artist · 1648–1733
All works by this person →Gerard Hoet trained with his father and with a pupil of Cornelis van Poelenburgh. Van Poelenburgh was an Italianate landscape painter who was one of the first Dutch painters to incorporate into his paintings the romantic ruins and fragments of antique statuary he had seen in Italy. In 1672 Hoet moved to The Hague, then spent a year in Paris, returning to the Netherlands via Brussels. Settling in U
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- late 17th–early 18th century
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Culture
- Dutch
- Department
- Paintings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
- Object ID
- 79b57ec2-707d-4f9c-96b8-482a98b13dfd
From the Getty Museum record
Seated under a canopy at the lavish banquet that she is hosting for Marc Antony, Cleopatra holds a glass of wine into which she is about to place a priceless pearl earring as an ostentatious sign of her indifference to wealth. The pearl dissolves in the wine, which she then drinks to Antony's health. In return, he presents her with Cyprus, Phoenicia, Coele-Syria, and parts of Arabia. Since the late sixteenth century, newly available translations of the *Life of Marc Antony* had led to the rediscovery across Europe of the legend of the beautiful, brilliant, and powerful Cleopatra. Her story soon became a popular subject for plays and paintings. Gerard Hoet set his historical subject from the first century B.C. in a lavish late Baroque interior. Three versions of the *Banquet of Cleopatra* by the artist survive, all of which show his imaginative architectural settings and careful rendering of rich clothes and accessories. Hoet's works typify the classicizing style of Dutch academic art around 1700.
The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Getty Museum and other institutions.