The artwork is located in the garden representing Denmark in the International Peace Gardens. The garden was dedicated on June 5, 1955.

The statue of The Little Mermaid depicts Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the same name which was written in 1837. There are thirteen replicas of The Little Mermaid statue around the world including the half-size replica in the Danish garden. This statue was stolen on February 26, 2010, but was recovered on April 7, evidently abandoned in the park after the thief became nervous about being caught with it.

The original statue, which is located in the Copenhagen Harbor, was commissioned in 1909 by Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of Carlsberg Beer, who had been fascinated by a ballet about the fairytale in Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre and asked the ballerina, Ellen Price, to model for the statue. The sculptor Edvard Eriksen created the bronze statue, which was unveiled on August 23, 1913. The statue’s head was modelled after Price, but as the ballerina did not agree to model in the nude, the sculptor’s wife, Eline Eriksen, was used for the body.

The Mermaid falls into a category of iconic statues that cities have come to regard as mascots or as embodiments of the spirit of a place.