Percival Ball studied at the Royal Academy and exhibited from 1865 to 1882. He was awarded a medal in 1866 for his relief depicting The Brazen Serpent. Of his works, the busts of the author Blandford Edwards and of Amelia Ann Edwards are in the National Portrait Gallery and his relief of Phryne before Praxiteles is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. The latter was designed and modelled while the sculptor was in Sydney in 1899, and then cast by Singer and Sons in Frome, Somerset.
Ball's marble The Genius of Lancashire, now in the Manchester City Art Gallery, most closely resembles the present work. It too is a classical study of the human nude, and shares a purity of design and form. In 1879 Ball exhibited two works at the Royal Academy, of which the Bacchante - statuette may be related to the present marble.