This is one of 104 life-size sculptures (27 full figures, 27 busts, 50 heads) created for New Yorker Malvina Hoffman’s Races of Mankind for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Her best known commission, Races of Mankind broke attendance records its first year, 1933, with two million visitors. That year small bronze versions such as this, one-third life-size, were first sold in Paris and reviewed there by art critics. By early 1934 the small works were selling well at New York’s Grand Central Galleries.

From the exhibition:Frontier to Foundry: the Making of Small Bronze Sculpture in the Gilcrease Collection, December 2014 - March 2015.
Ann Boulton Young, Associate Conservator for the Gilcrease Museum, 2014.