Nydia was the most famous of Rogers’s sculptures as well as the most popular, to judge from the fact that the artist sold at least fifty-two examples (see Rogers, Rogers, pp. 200-203 for lists of locations of life-size and half-life-size examples). It is just as remarkable that, having modeled Nydia in 1855-56, Rogers would sell the present example as late as 1888. Although it had still been much admired at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, only a work of wide reputation and classic status would have survived the changes of taste and style that swept American sculpture during that interval. Its subject is Nydia, the virtuous, blind flower girl in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii, published in 1834. The sculpture recreates a moment in the story when she became separated from some friends she was attempting to lead to safety on the seashore, since in the general darkness that followed the eruption of Vesuvius her developed sense of hearing was an advantage in trying to escape the doomed city. Those familiar with the novel saw her situation in a broader sense of brave struggle against impossible odds (1835 edition, 2: 189): Poor girl! her courage was beautiful to behold! and Fate seemed to favor one so helpless. The boiling torrents touched her not, save by the general rain which accompanied them, the huge fragments of scoria shivered the pavement before and beside her, but spared the frail form .... Weak, exposed, yet fearless, supported by one wish, she was the very emblem of Psyche in her wanderings; -- of Hope, walking through the Valley of the Shadow; a very emblem of the Soul itself -- lone but comforted, amid the dangers and the snares of life! In the best tradition of neoclassical sculpture Rogers sought inspiration for his subject among ancient marbles. Nydia’s bent and tentative pose may have been based on a Hellenistic copy of the Old Market Woman (example in Vatican Museum) or the group of Niobe and Her Daughters in the Uffizi in Florence. The latter may have been the source of the baroque forms of Nydia’s clinging, yet flying drapery, which, more than the fallen capital at her feet, suggests the danger faced by the helpless, wet, and wind-tossed young woman. Although Nydia’s regular facial features and the sculpture’s sources in antique art are in the tradition of neoclassical sculpture, its formal extravagance, drama, and excessively sentimental literary source are departures from that tradition that, nevertheless, made it the most popular American neoclassical sculpture ever. The inscription does not include a date, but centered under the artist’s name is the word Rome followed by a comma, as if the date were to be added when the piece was sold. The reason for its omission is unknown.

After the Jacksonian presidency (1829–37), the adolescent country began an aggressive foreign policy of territorial expansion, exemplified by the success of the Mexican-American War (1846–48). Economic growth, spurred by new technologies such as the railroad and telegraph, assisted the early stages of empire building. As a comfortable and expanding middle class began to demonstrate its wealth and power, a fervent nationalist spirit was celebrated in the writings of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Artists such as Emanuel Leutze produced history paintings re-creating the glorious past of the relatively new country. Such idealizations ignored the mounting political and social differences that threatened to split the country apart. The Civil War slowed development, affecting every fiber of society, but surprisingly was not the theme of many paintings. The war’s devastation did not destroy the American belief in progress, and there was an undercurrent of excitement due to economic expansion and increased settlement of the West.
During the postwar period Americans also began enthusiastically turning their attention abroad. They flocked to Europe to visit London, Paris, Rome, Florence, and Berlin, the major cities on the Grand Tour. Art schools in the United States offered limited classes, so the royal academies in Germany, France, and England attracted thousands of young Americans. By the 1870s American painting no longer evinced a singleness of purpose. Although Winslow Homer became the quintessential Yankee painter, with his representations of country life during the reconstruction era, European aesthetics began to infiltrate taste.