This marble group was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1827. According to Marochetti's biographer, Calderini, the work was then acquired by Marchese Alfieri di Sostegno, who presented it to Carlo Felice, King of Sardinia. A different version of the story has been told by the historian, M. Olmo. Olmo claims that  Filiberto Avogadro di Collobiano, Superintendant of the Piedmontese Royal Household, befriended Marochetti in Rome and suggested that the sculptor present his group to Carlo Felice.

This excursion into genre in a neoclassical style betrays the influence of the Italian sculptor, Lorenzo Bartolini, and of Marochetti's own master Francois-Joseph Bosio. The newspaper Le Constitutionnel reported on this group in its issue for 11 April 1827: "For some time now, there has been on show in the sculpture gallery of the new exhibition, a marble representing a hunting dog, looking at a bird, held by a child. The dog's look of desire, the naïve simplicity of the child, give a great charm to this composition, remarkable also for the purity of its design. This work, which is the first by M. Marochetti, a pupil of M. Bosio, and only twenty-five years old, gives promise of a distinguished artist."

A brief biographical account of Marochetti's early career appeared in two British newspapers on the occasion of the inauguration of the equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow in 1844. There are mis-spellings of names and wrong dates in this, but it contains some information about this sculpture, which may have come from Marochetti himself. The article claims that Marochetti sent the sculpture from Rome to his brother in Paris, and it was his brother who, without his knowledge, caused it to be exhibited in the Salon. The group, it is claimed in the article "established his name as a rising artist, although he had not yet devoted himself to art as a profession". The article is credited to a newspaper called The Constitutional, but appears in the Glasgow Herald on 11 Oct. 1844, and with still more errors in the Glasgow Citizen on 12 Oct 1844.