ATTRIBUTED TO SAMUEL ROBB (ACTIVE 1876-1903), NEW YORK CITY, LAST QUARTER 19TH CENTURY

In the nineteenth century, American tobacconists began to use the storefront Indian figure as an advertising tool. Production of the figures flourished between 1850 and 1880, as ship figurehead carves increasingly turned toward the manufacture of the storefront figures. Their manufacture was concentrated in the Northeast, particularly in New York workshops of Samuel Robb, Thomas White, William Demuth and Thomas V. Brooks. Cigar store figures with abstracted features similar to this example are exhibited on forms produced in Samuel Robb's workshop. An example of an Indian brave signed Samuel A. Robb is located in the New York Historical Society and is illustrated in Robert Bishop, American Folk Sculpture (New York, 1974), p. 256, no. 478.

Samuel Robb was born in New York, the son of a Scottish shipwright who had recently immigrated to the United States. His mother was related to Jacob Anderson, a renowned ship carvers working in New York in the mid-19th century. Scholarship suggests that in 1864, Robb apprenticed to Thomas V. Brooks, another successful New York ship-carver. Eventually, Robb went to work in the shop of William Demuth, a distributor of tobacco products who carried a full line of shop figures. In 1876, he and a partner, Thomas White (1825-1902) opened a own shop at 195 Canal Street, where they stayed until 1888, when they moved to 114 Centre Street.

Drake was a tobacconist on Market Street in Corning, New York.