Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen The Heliades.
The gallery
Heliades
Rupert Bunny, c. 1902–1905
Bunny’s Symbolist canvas gathers Phaethon’s sisters in a dusk of gold and mourning — bodies already half-poplar, amber tears implied in the palette. Painted in Paris for the fin-de-siècle taste for Ovidian metamorphosis, it is among the few modern pictures that name the Heliades as the subject rather than their brother’s fall alone.
The Sisters of Phaethon Transformed into Poplars
French school (after Ovid), 17th–18th century
An Ovidian plate freezes the sisters mid-change: bark climbing limbs, arms still raised in lament for Phaethon. The print tradition made the Heliades’ poplars and amber tears a standard Metamorphoses vignette for European readers who knew the sun-god’s daughters chiefly through that Latin grief.
The Sisters of Phaethon
Santi di Tito, c. 1570–1600
Santi di Tito’s Mannerist scene stages the Heliades’ transformation on the Eridanus bank — sisters turning to trees while the river and mourning gods close the myth of Phaethon’s fall. Florentine disegno keeps the Oceanid daughters visible as a chorus of grief before the bark seals them.