So the story goes that Cleopatra had the floor of the banquet hall covered in rose petals for Mark Antony. Not a scattering — a floor of them, something like eighteen inches deep, so that when he came through the doors he was walking into a room where the ground had been replaced with roses. Every petal picked by hand and brought in by the cartload, in the right season, on the right day, timed to open. All of it for a single evening, for one man to walk into.
The details have surely improved over two thousand years of retelling. But the picture has never left me. It’s the most extravagant version of a gesture we still make in miniature — here is the loveliest and least useful thing I could think to give you: a rose.
And I did wonder whether that banquet is why we associate roses with love. It isn’t, quite. The rose was already Aphrodite’s flower, said to have sprung up where she wept for Adonis, and the Romans inherited the whole association intact. So Cleopatra wasn’t inventing the symbol. She was quoting it, at enormous expense, to a man who would have understood the reference immediately. Which is somehow better.
This one is a single bloom, and if you asked me what color it is I’d say salmon pink — and then have to admit that’s not in the painting anywhere. There’s yellow in the outer petals, a real red down in the center, violet in the shadows between, green reflecting up off the leaves, and a cool near-white where the light comes over the top. Not one of those is salmon. Put them all next to each other and the eye does the rest, which is the whole trick and never stops feeling like getting away with something.
Anyway. It’s one rose, painted in every color of the rainbow so it could come out the color it actually is. And I left it on the bush. Uncut, still attached, the leaves crowding in behind it — the state a rose is in for most of its life and almost never in a painting. One of the several thousand Cleopatra would have needed and hadn’t gotten to yet.
P.S. — Those petals were reportedly a cubit deep. I’ve measured a cubit against my own arm twice now, and it’s a great deal of roses!
No. 76 ∙ For Cleopatra
Oil on wood panel · 8 × 8 in. · 2026 · framed in a warm gold fluted frame
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