The present group, signed with the monogram 'GZ' and dated '1610' is the work of Georg Zürn (around 1583 - before 1635). No other figures of this type by Zürn are known, but the style of the piece is entirely characteristic, if unusually refined. Georg was one of six sons of Hans Zürn the Elder, and was active as a leading member of the family sculpture business in Überlingen, South Germany, where the Minster contains the splendid altarpiece executed at exactly this time (1607-1610) for the Betz family, as well as the even more ambitious high altarpiece of 1613-1619. Comparisons between the present figure and the apostles in the relief of the Dormition of the Virgin (Manteuffel, op.cit., pl. 112) in the former, and the adoring shepherds of the Nativity (Manteuffel, op.cit., pls. 6-11)
on the latter, confirm that the same artistic intelligence is at work.
Carved in fruitwood, a favoured medium for small sculpture, the Peddlar with his Dog is a northern equivalent of an Italian bronze statuette, and may be imagined as having been designed with the same sort of destination - a well-appointed study or Kunstkammer - in mind. Here Zürn, whose art is close in spirit to the court style of the painters and sculptors working for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II in Prague, poses the figure with a swaying, mannered elegance, and endows it with a contrapposto of the hips that is especially evident when the group is seen from the left. Its energy and charm are immediately apparent, but it is nevertheless a work that does not give up all its secrets easily, and repays protracted contemplation.
It has been suggested that the present figure was subsequently turned into a Buttenmann by the addition of a drinking cup in the form of a wine basket to his back. However, it is by no means self-evident that the minimal cutting on his back would have sufficed to support such a vessel.