The offered lot depicts a typical rural Russian scene, a peasant mother and son going out into the woods with sled in tow to cut firewood. However, in the midst of chopping the tree which is depicted at far left, they are suddenly attacked by a bear. The peasant woman is shown with ax firmly gripped and raised above her head moments before she strikes the bear with a deadly blow, presumably saving her son. The ebonized plinth upon which this work rests is mounted with a cast bronze element which cleverly conveys the outcome of the attack expressed by the bear skin mounted over crossed pine logs and surmounted by an ax.

Little if any reliable information appears to exists for the Russian sculptor who signed his works E.NAPS. Some sources suggest that he was from a family of Baltic Germans and was self-taught developing his artistic skills firstly as a restorer of porcelain as well as bronze sculptures for the antiques trade. Those works which many specialists consider Naps’ earliest creations are nearly if not completely exact copies of works by the heralded Russian sculpture Evgeny Aleksandrovich Lansere (1848-1886). Subsequently, there is also a theory that E. Naps is simply a pseudonym for Lansere who, as some have suggested, felt financially strangled due to his restricted contract obliging him to cast all his works at the Chopin foundry, the main competitor of the C.F. Woerffel foundry, at which all works signed by E. NAPS seem to have been cast. On the overall basis of style, technique, modeling and the scarcity of any solid information regarding Evgeny Ivanovich Naps, this theory seems quite plausible. Additionally, the use of pseudonyms by artists in similar dilemmas at this time is well documented. Whatever the case, one thing is certain; bronze sculptures signed E.Naps exhibit a true virtuosity of skill which clearly accounts for their continually growing popularity amongst collectors of Russian art.