Paul Wayland Bartlett was the son of the well-known sculptor, critic, and teacher Truman H. Bartlett. Determined that his son would be educated abroad, the elder Bartlett sent him to Paris. There he became fascinated by the popular genre of animal sculpture and eventually worked for sculptor Georges Gardet, who specialized in this field. This sculpture of a bear cub playfully scratching his ear is a reduced figure taken from Bohemian Bear Tamer, a life-size figure group by Bartlett.