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Randolph Rogers, American 1825-1892.
A white marble figure of Nydia the blind flower girl of Pompeii,
152cm.; 59Nins. high

Nydia is one of the great icons of nineteenth-century American sculpture. Like Powers' Greek Slave or Gibson's Tinted Venus, it achieved international recognition and brought the sculptor considerable fame and fortune. It is said that between 1855 and 1892 orders for Nydia earned Rogers around seventy thousand dollars.

Inspired by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Last Days of Pompeii of 1834, the touching pathos of the subject and vituosity of the design brought Nydia almost insatiable popularity in America. Interestingly, twenty years after Rogers first modelled Nydia he exhibited it at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 to predictable acclaim. This was the same exhibition in which Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier exhibited his Jeune Femme Fellah an opulent mixed-media ethnographic bust, truely the aesthetic antithesis of Rogers' late Neo-classical marble. Rogers' account books record fifty-two orders for replicas of Nydia. Several examples are in public collections in America, but many more are now lost.
Related literature: M F Rogers, Randolph Rogers American Sculptor in Rome, Amherst, 1971, pp33-40