[1] It shows Cleopatra VII reclining on a banquette and observing the effects of poisons on prisoners condemned to death, as described in Mark Antony's Plutarch's Lives.

[4] Cabanel had always had a taste for historical and orientalist themes and when the painting was first seen by the Parisian public he was fêted by the critics and showered with honours.

The painting has two parts, and it presents in the foreground Queen Cleopatra seated on a bench on which have been placed fabrics and a tiger skin whose head has been preserved.

A woman stands with a bottle of poison in her right hand, above a slave who just took it, holding his stomach, with his face marked by suffering.

In full light, at the feet of sumptuously colored hieroglyphs, slaves are being killed just to improve the quality of the Queen's poisons.