Girl with a Squirrel

Show figure carvers of the late nineteenth century were the most dynamic advertisers of their day. They created large, often life sized, sculptural figures for businesses to place on the sidewalk in front of their businesses to attract customers. Naturally, the carvers sought every advantage in capturing attention; in particular, they looked to popular culture to appropriate images that would be instantly recognizable.  The life size figure of a Lady of Fashion in the Fenimore Art Museum collection is a great example of this phenomenon.

Generations of visitors to the museum have looked at this figure and asked, “Why does she have a squirrel on her head?” The answer is a couple of layers deep.  In the early 1870s, the printmaking firm of Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives published a lithograph poking fun at women’s fashions of the times. The print, called “Girl of the Period,” showed a modern young woman in a fashionable dress (complete with bustle in the rear and the forward-leaning “Grecian Bend”) with a hat that seemingly included a live squirrel. The inclusion of the squirrel was meant to lampoon the use (over-use?) of animal fur in the extravagant hats of the era. 

It’s worth noting that the young lady is also smoking a cigarette. Show figure carvers like Samuel Robb of New York (the artist who likely carved our figure) catered mainly to establishments that sold tobacco. The most ubiquitous figures for advertising tobacconists’ shops was, of course, the cigar store Indian. But by the 1870s the carvers had gotten much more creative in an attempt to catch the attention of a public that had gotten used to the Native American figures. Hence, the plethora of new figures that included everything from baseball players to Santa Claus.

The demand for these figures can be judged by the output of the carving shops. Robb’s main competitor (and former teacher), Thomas V. Brooks of New York, advertised that his shop  could produce about 200 figures a year, and he always had about 100 figures on the showroom floor at any one time. The figures went out to locations across the country, where they graced the sidewalks of small towns and cities just about everywhere.

Although most commercial folk art forms from the nineteenth century were replaced by technology (such as the camera, which eliminated the need for folk portraiture), these show figures had a very different nemesis: they were legislated out of existence. By the turn of the century, new ordinances designed to make urban areas safer and cleaner banned large obstructions from sidewalks.  Untold numbers of these great carvings were discarded. A lucky few were collected by visionaries who saw their artistic value and importance to a national culture that was rapidly disappearing.

The African American Cigar Store Indian

This is another in a series of posts about the great folk art pieces included in the Fenimore Art Museum’s traveling exhibition Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art, which is on view at the New York State Museum in Albany through January 6, 2010. This exhibition is curated by Dr. Gretchen Sullivan Sorin, Director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program, who, by the way, has just been awarded the prestigious Katherine Coffey Award from the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums. Unlike the first sculpture I discussed in my August 31 post, which was a depiction of a black man by a white artist, this piece was created by an African American carver.

Our “African American Cigar Store Figure” (above left) was found in Freehold, New Jersey in the mid-20th century. According to local tradition, it was carved in about 1825 by a freed slave named Job. This has never been substantiated, but the piece itself presents some compelling physical evidence that strongly suggests that it is the product of a black folk artist.

First, it is not made like any other known cigar store figures carved by white artists (many of them German immigrants) in American urban centers in the mid-19th century. These figures were usually made by sectioning off a length of solid log (usually pine, which was straight-grained: old ships’ masts were ideal for this purpose) and carving the figure’s body and head. The arms, which often extended outward, would be carved separately and joined to the body. Job’s figure is not made this way at all. Instead, the artist carved and joined thirteen separate pieces of wood to form the body and its appendages. The precision of the joinery suggests that Job may have mastered the craft of cabinetmaking, a trade he would have shared with numerous African Americans of his time.



Second, this figure does not look like any other known cigar store figure. The torso and arms are boldly stylized into angular, geometric shapes. Likewise, the face is flattened and mask-like. The vast majority of cigar store figures were naturalistic carvings with faces that were either brutally savage or idealized with Anglo-American features. Since our figure’s discovery and publication in the 1940s, numerous scholars have noted these distinctly African stylistic traits, as seen in the examples of African art at above left and right.


The folk art scholar and collector Michael D. Hall (whose collection is in the Milwaukee Art Museum) often used our Job figure to illustrate how the best American folk art was represented by those rare pieces that were within an established visual tradition yet displayed an individual’s stamp of creativity and innovation. I can’t help but agree. But there is also something about this figure that is quintessentially American in the delicate balance between this former slave’s cultural memory and his social, economic, and artistic aspirations.