Before they began their legendary voyage to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece, the Argonauts made an offering of flour, honey, and sea to the ocean deities, sacrificed bulls to them, and entreated their protection from the dangers of their journey.[25] Some names, consistent with the Oceanids' charge of having "youths in their keeping", represent things which parents might hope to be bestowed upon their children: Plouto ("Wealth"), Tyche ("Good Fortune"), Idyia ("Knowing"), and Metis ("Wisdom").Lehmann's painting was savaged as lacking in Classical decorum by the critics of the Salon at which it was exhibited; in particular, the nymphs clustered about the sea-girt rock on which Prometheus is chained were compared to "a troop of young seals clambering onshore".[33] Later artists reinterpreted the nymphs tumbling among the waves, as depicted by both painters, in order to portray individual Oceanids as female manifestations of sea foam.Examples include Wilhelm Trübner's study of a female form in a frothy wave (Weiblicher Akt im Schaum einer Welle), which he titled "Oceanide" (1872);[34] and William-Adolphe Bouguereau's Océanide (1904), portraying a nude extended on the shore in the track of the incoming tide,[35] of which a more sympathetic critic of the 1905 Salon noted how the artist delights in comparing a lissom body to the sea's undulations.In Johann Eduard Müller's marble statue of "Prometheus and the Oceanides" (1868–79), the nymphs scramble upwards in an attempt to alleviate the Titan's suffering,[38] as they do in Lehmann's canvas.The smaller-scale Océanides (1905) of Auguste Rodin cluster like waves breaking at the base of a rock, their "supple feminine forms emerging from rough marble".This gave the turn of the century sculptor, Oscar Spalmach (1864–1917), the opportunity to drape his white marble Oceanids about the rocks of the cascade in a variety of painterly poses.
The 1925 bronze copy of the
Océanides
in the Rodin Museum, Philadelphia