In Greek mythologi Hebe is the goddess of eternal youth as well as the keeper of the fountain of youth. In some myths, she was the Cupbearer of the gods. She was also sometimes said to be the patron of brides as well as the goddess of pardon and forgiveness.

Proveniens: The figure was bought in 1989 at Galerie Park Palace in Monaco by the late Danish publisher and art collecter Mr. Palle Fogtdal (1931–2019).

The figure is made after Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) figure of Hebé from 1815. Son of an Icelandic woodcarver, Thorvaldsen grew up in Copenhagen, where he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1781 to train as a sculptor. The young artist left for Rome in 1787, where he gravitated around the community of his fellow Danish emigrants. Among them were the antiquarian and scholar Jörgen Zoëga (1755–1809) and the painter and critic Asmus Jacob Carstens (1754–1798), both of whom had a considerable influence on Thorvaldsen's development as an artist, particularly with regard to his study of classical sculpture and the theories of the famous archaeologist Johan Joachim Winkelmann.

On the death of Antonio Canova in 1822, Thorvaldsen became the oldest and most respected sculptor in Rome, as confirmed by commissions such as the funerary monument to Pope Pius VII in St. Peter's Basilica (1823–31), and appointments such as the presidency of the prestigious Accademia di San Luca (1828), a position previously held by Canova.

Thorvaldsen was inspired by Canova's Hebe, executed between 1796 and 1799, to create his own representation of the Goddess of Youth in 1806, forming the counterpart to the Ganymede of 1804. He chose to capture her almost static, in a moment of contemplation of her cup evoking the myth of the goddess. Indeed, both Ganymede and Hebe had been chosen to serve the nectar of immortality to the Gods of Olympus. Unlike Ganymede, Hebe was clumsy and failed to serve the precious elixir properly.

Concerning the goddess's costume, Thorvaldsen made a polemical choice: she wears a mixture between the antique peplum originally fixed on both shoulders, and the short chiton which reveals a breast, in the manner of the Amazons. This choice of clothing was shocking, Zoëga is said to have pointed out to her: “No honest woman was dressed like this in Antiquity, let alone a goddess! ” (E. di Majo, op. cit., p. 140). Thorvaldsen finally made a second version of this model in 1816, in which Hebe's chest is completely covered.

Today the original marble model is in the Thorvaldsen Museum (inv. no. A 875) acquired in 1936 from the Californian collector William Randolph Hearst.