Cigar Store Indians

Cisco’s Gallery offers antique tobacco-shop advertising figures historically and commonly known in the antiques trade as “cigar store Indians.” These carved and painted figures were used prominently outside 19th-century tobacco shops, where stereotyped representations of Native people became commercial symbols associated with tobacco. Today they are collected as examples of American trade advertising, folk sculpture and the visual culture of their period. Individual figures are evaluated for age, maker, condition, surface and provenance.