Several influences combined in Putnam’s distinctive work: the powerful animal subject matter of Antoine-Louis Barye (1796-1875), the fluid modeling of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), and the artist’s own knowledge of California wildlife. Pumas and other large cats were Putnam’s favorite subjects, usually rendered, as here, as immensely powerful creatures with heavy, muscular limbs. In Puma and Deer the surging form of the puma is contrasted with that of the limp, lifeless deer carried across its back. Because of their vigorous modeling and lack of finish, Putnam’s works greatly appealed to modernists. Little information concerning the bronzes cast by the different foundries used by Putnam is available. The museum’s cast has no foundry mark, but it does bear a copyright date of 1912. Putnam was associated with Macbeth Gallery in New York from 1908 to 1917 (Archiv. Am. Art, Macbeth Gallery Papers, Putnam-Gallery Correspondence, 1908-13, and Artists’ Credit Books, 1910-18, not on microfilm), and for part of that time, from at least 1911 to 1914, used Roman Bronze Works to cast his bronzes (New York, Roman Bronze Works, Ledgers, unpaginated). A cast of Puma and Deer in the Oakland Museum bears a Roman Bronze foundry mark and a different version of the copyright inscription, so it would appear the museum’s cast does not belong to the same edition. In 1913 Putnam induced his brother-in-law, Frederick Storey, to resume casting in their own foundry, with Putnam helping with the retouching and patination of the bronzes. Apparently with an interruption during the First World War, they continued to produce bronzes until early in 1918. Bronzes marked with the name "Putnam and Storey Foundry" are known, but it is not known whether all were so marked. During the war Rodin arranged for a foundry in Paris to make casts from Putnam’s plasters for exhibition at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, but these casts have not been identified. In 1921 Mrs. Adolph Spreckels, who with her husband helped found the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, bought fifty-five plasters from the artist for the express purpose of having them cast by Alexis Rudier in his Paris foundry, whose mark they bear. Two sets were made, and Mrs. Spreckels gave one to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (now part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) and the other to the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego (now the San Diego [Calif.] Museum of Art).

Until 1893, when historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the western frontier closed, the nation had perceived itself as an ever-expanding geographical entity. The frontier moved westward as the forests of the Adirondacks, Catskills, and Alleghenys of the eastern seaboard were cleared and inhabited. Euro-American settlers pushed across the continent, through the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, until they reached the Pacific Ocean. Although the actual travels of explorers, government surveyors, and settlers can be traced through the changing locales in landscape paintings, such depictions were to a certain extent idealizations. In the romantic-realist tradition of the Hudson River school, artists emphasized the primitive character of the wilderness and presented the newly cultivated farmlands as agrarian oases divinely blessed by rainbows and golden mists.
Artists and writers promoted nature as a national treasure. However, the wealth of the land was measured in commercial as well as aesthetic terms. Railroads and axes appear in paintings as symbols of civilization, yet they also were instruments of destruction.
According to some, the nation was preordained by God to span the continent from coast to coast. In 1845 the editor John O’Sullivan coined the term “Manifest Destiny,” referring to the country’s duty to annex western territories and exploit their resources. The same railroad tycoons and land developers who promoted such a policy also commissioned artists to paint epic scenes of the American landscape. Manifest Destiny ignored the rights of Native Americans, who had inhabited the region long before European settlers arrived. Consequently, it is not surprising that Native Americans are absent from, or stereotyped in, most of the painted views of the land they called their home. The West seen in most nineteenth-century paintings was largely one of the imagination.