A heart-stopping work when exhibited at the French Salon of 1875, Youth was intended for a monument honoring École des Beaux-Arts students who died in the Franco-Prussian War. Among them was the twenty-eight-year-old Henri Regnault (French, 1843–1871). An acclaimed painter, he had already fulfilled his military service obligations when the war began in 1870, but he patriotically reenlisted and was killed defending Paris in the Battle of Buzenval.

Evoking romantic sentiments of love, loss, and nobility, Henri-Michel-Antoine Chapu imagined Youth as a lithe woman dressed in a classically inspired gown and offering a laurel branch to a bust (not seen in this model) representing artists lost in the war. Chapu’s sculpture became part of a marble monument that today resides in a courtyard at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Small-scale bronze reproductions like this one were made for middle-class collectors and art enthusiasts.