In 1846, François Rude's native town of Dijon commissioned a sculpture from their renowned citizen. By 1855, the year of Rude's death, the two and a half metre high marble of Hébé à l'Aigle de Jupiter was far advanced, but was completed posthumously under the direction of his widow and Paul Cabet. It was exhibited at the salon of 1857 to great critical acclaim and is now in the Dijon Museum.

Rude inscribed the base of the marble Hébé à l'Aigle de Jupiter with the names of Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Ovid, Virgil and Catullus, testifying to his Antique training and imbuing the work with a poetic significance. The figure of Hebe has a harmonious and linear face, emphasised by the raised arm and the fluid sliding motion of her drapery. She represents the goddess of youth and is thus crowned by spring flowers. The eagle, contrastingly, is a bold and angular force, driving ferociously towards the ambrosia, and ruffled by the smiling coquette who holds it just out of reach. The subject has abandoned it's Antique parentage and is treated in a modern vein with eloquent naturalism. Rude has elevated Hebe to the symbol of Woman and the eagle to that of Desire, two of the energies he perceived as fundamental to the cycle of life.

The group was cast in bronze in a reduced size by the Thiébaut foundry and examples are in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Louvre.