This exceptionally ambitious life-size sculpture is thought to be the largest porcelain figure ever made in a single piece. It represents Hebe, the goddess of youth in Greek mythology and cup-bearer for the gods, and was modelled after a statue carved in Rome in 1816 by the Danish artist and collector Bertel Thorvaldsen, one of Europe's leading sculptors working in the neo-classical style. By the 1870s, when this figure was made, the demand for biscuit porcelain figures after famous statues was well established in Europe. Unglazed and white, biscuit was an ideal medium for the reproduction of sculptures and had maintained a steady popularity since its introduction at Vincennes, France, in the mid-eighteenth century.
The Danish factory of Bing & Grøndahl (founded in 1853) concentrated on fashionable and popular wares for an expanding middle-class market, producing sculptural ceramics in the classical or Renaissance style, in keeping with the European taste for historicism. A popular staple of the Danish porcelain industry in the nineteenth century, Thorvaldsen biscuit replicas also reached the international market. They could be made in series, relatively inexpensively, and thus sold to a much wider public. Bing & Grøndahl manufactured this figure of Hebe in three different sizes. The two smaller sizes were first produced in 1862, and this version, which has the same dimensions as Thorvaldsen's original, is believed to be the only example in this size. It was made for the International Exhibition of 1871, held in London, and was probably intended as a unique showpiece.