ATTRIBUTED TO THOMAS V. BROOKS (1828-1895) OR SAMUEL ROBB (1851-1928), NEW YORK, CIRCA 1875

With her dynamic stance and holding aloft a cluster of tobacco leaves, this ‘Indian Maiden’ is a commanding presence that would likely have welcomed visitors to a tobacco shop. The store front figure of an Indian, a symbol of America’s heritage and commerce, first appeared in England during the seventeenth century. Two centuries later, American tobacconists began to use the store front Native American figure as an advertising tool. Production of the figures flourished between 1850 and 1880 and their manufacture was concentrated in the Northeast, particularly from the New York workshops of Samuel A. Robb, Thomas White, William Demuth and Thomas V. Brooks.

Thomas V. Brooks (1828-1895) was born in New York. Brooks began carving ship figures as an apprentice but soon switched to tobacconist figures, which he made in wide variety. By 1853, Brooks had set up his own shop when he moved to 258 South Street. He worked steadily filling orders and by 1870, his shop was the most productive in New York; it is estimated that his shop could make about two hundred figures a year (Frederick Fried, Artists in Wood: American Carvers of Cigar-Store Indians, Show Figures, and Circus Wagons (New York, 1970), p. 183). Among the many apprentices who went through his shop was Samuel Robb (1851-1928). Robb, also born in New York, was the son of a Scottish shipwright and related to Jacob Anderson, a renowned ship carver. Scholarship suggests that in 1864, Robb worked under Thomas Brooks, which accounts for the almost indistinguishable similarities in the renderings of their figures.

It is only fitting that George Lois (1931-2022) and his wife Rosemary (1930-2022) owned a piece of iconic American advertising. Lois is remembered as a revolutionary in his approach to advertising in his role as art-director for Esquire magazine. The present sculpture being an earlier form of marketing was well-suited for its later custodian.