Samuel Anderson Robb (1851–1928) was an American sculptor, best known for his carved wooden figures for tobacco shops and circus wagons. Robb was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the U ...

, the son of a Scottish shipwright. He apprenticed to a shipbuilder (probably Thomas V. Brooks) for five years, then went to work for a wood-carver, making figures for tobacco shops, and attending night classes at the

National Academy of Design The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the f ...

and

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

. After his apprenticeship, he worked for William Demuth carving tobacco figures. In 1876 he married Emma Jane Pelham and opened his own carving shop. After Emma died in 1878, Robb married Agnes Loudon in 1881, with whom he had four children. He subsequently left his family, however, and had no communication with them for seventeen years, when he encountered Agnes on the street and the family was reunited. Robb's workshop was the largest in nineteenth-century New York City. His carvings ranged from traditional

cigar store Indian The cigar store Indian or wooden Indian is an advertisement figure, in the likeness of a Native American, used to represent tobacconists. The figures are often three-dimensional wooden sculptures several feet tall – up to life-sized. They ar ...

s to circus wagons and ventriloquist dummies. He closed his workshop at 114 Centre Street in 1903, after completing a set of circus wagon carvings for

Barnum & Bailey The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (also known as the Ringling Bros. Circus, Ringling Bros., the Barnum & Bailey Circus, Barnum & Bailey, or simply Ringling) is an American traveling circus company billed as The Greatest Show on Ear ...

References

* Fried, Frederick, ''Artists in Wood: American Carvers of Cigar-Store Indians, Show Figures, and Circus Wagons'', New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1970.
Smithsonian Institution

19th-century American sculptors 1851 births 1928 deaths 20th-century American sculptors {{US-sculptor-stub