Undine was a water spirit who longed for a human soul. She wanted a human soul, and perhaps the tragedy is that she found the human heart before she could ever truly belong to the human world.

This painting captures Undine at the moment after Huldbrand has betrayed her and driven her back to the water, the moment when she leaves the human world and returns to her immortal realm.

Through true love and her marriage to the mortal knight Huldbrand she became capable of the tenderness, devotion and depth of feeling that belong to human life. But when Huldbrand turns away from her, that fragile connection to the human world is shattered. Bound to the laws of the water spirits, she disappears beneath the water once more.

Her body is rendered in marble, inspired by the Undine of the German Romantic sculptor Robert Cauer the Elder. The stone embodies her immortal nature - cold, eternal, and beyond the mortality of human beings.

But her face has not become stone. It is still warm, living, and full of sorrow. Her wet hair carries the trace of the world she has just returned to, while her expression remains profoundly human: wounded by betrayal, filled with longing, and still bound by love.

The marble is what she is, the living face is what love has made her.