Born in New England, Paul Wayland Bartlett was sent to Paris at the age of nine because his father, sculptor and art critic Truman H. Bartlett, considered Paris the only place to get a proper artistic education.
Biography
There the young Bartlett studied with the sculptors Emmanuel Frémiet and Auguste Rodin, and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Bartlett earned a reputation for his animal studies. At the age of fourteen, he was exhibiting at the Paris Salon.
When Bohemian Bear Tamer, a bronze of a man standing over two cubs that won an honorable mention at the 1887 Salon, was exhibited in Chicago at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, it brought him his first artistic recognition in America.
The variety of titles by which the sculpture in known - the Bohemian Bear Tamer, the Bear Tamer and Primitive Man and Bears - may indicate that Bartlett want the group to have several interpretations.
Although Paul Wayland Bartlett lived most of his life in France, he became best known for his numerous monumental sculptural projects in America.
