Cleopatra

Albert Fourié's red-chalk drawing depicts a classical female figure in flowing drapery, seated among roses with a serpent at her feet—iconography identifying her as the Egyptian queen. Fourié, a French academic artist, employs the soft modeling and romantic idealization characteristic of Belle Époque illustration. The work exemplifies early twentieth-century salon aesthetics, where historical and mythological subjects provided opportunity for figure studies. Inscribed at lower left with the artist's signature and dated March 1915, the piece represents the tradition of allegorical and historical imagery that influenced commercial illustration and early visual storytelling before the formal development of sequential comic art.