Maryland-born sculptor William Henry Rinehart depicted Clytie—a water nymph described in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses—in the Neo-Classical style as an idealized nude rendered in white marble. According to Ovid, Clytie was abandoned by her lover Apollo. She wasted away for nine days without food or water, only able to watch Apollo blaze his way across the sky from dawn to dusk. At last, she was transformed into a sunflower whose face would forever follow the sun. In her right hand, Rinehart’s figure holds a sunflower as a symbol of her faithfulness, and more sunflowers grow around the tree stump which supports her.