AMERICAN, 19TH/ 20TH CENTURY

With his dark skin and feathered skirt, this particular cigar store figure is variously referred to as a blackamoor, or Virginian, and illustrates a continuation of the origin of these figures in seventeenth-century English shops advertising the sale of the newly discovered fad of smoking tobacco and its connection to the New World. A nearly identical model was owned by the collector Rudolf F. Haffenreffer, III (c. 1902-1991) and sold in the second of a series of sales of his cigar store figures (fig. 1; Sold, Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 11 April 1956, lot 93).