Billy, inspired by and rendered after a family goat, was one of several animal studies that Albert Laessle created. Laessle's work portrayed animals so realistically that—according to his own recollections—he was once charged by his fellow students with casting directly from life. He silenced his critics by making a similar sculpture in wax, a material that could not easily be cast.

Billy was given to the City of Philadelphia by Eli Kirke Price II through the Fairmount Park Art Association, and was installed in 1919 to the delight of the many children who have frequented Rittenhouse Square since that time. A later sculptural group of Pan, Dancing Goat, and Duck and Turtle Fountain (c. 1928) is installed in Camden, New Jersey, in a park in front of the Walt Whitman Center, formerly a public library.

Adapted from Public Art in Philadelphia by Penny Balkin Bach (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1992).