Featured Is this a pipe and match holder?

He is very well made, I like the face.
He has a medal, so a veteran could be right. But now he is wearing a high hat and jacket with coat tails (what is that called in English?) like any civilian.
He could have fallen on hard times or been poor from the start. Clothes were passed from one class to another. His clothes could have been worn by a more well to do person originally, and by the time he got them they were worn and mended.

 

I'm not sure about what the jacket is called -- maybe just a dress coat or tailcoat. I like your ideas about the old man's story.

 

Bronwen, you're right about the middle point being the left knee. I found a little stick to try angling up to his hand and took a photo. I also started wondering about the whole idea of this being for cigars or cigarettes when you mentioned this wouldn't be a good way to hold them. This is just a guess, but could it have been made to hold small candles that people used to light a lantern or bigger candles?

 

The addition of your perfect little stick really does seem to complete him.

While it certainly could hold candles of the right size (what is the diameter of the holes?), my gut feeling is that the original suggestion that it relates to smoking is correct. Something you use to light a number of other candles or gas jets would be long & skinny, like a rushlight.

I can find pieces with a degree of similarity, but so far not with all those individual openings. For example:




Think auctioneer is wrong about this being an American cowboy; another one that brings Garibaldi to mind.

 

I think it looks like General alpheus williams or schofield, perhaps not.

 

Teddy Roosevelt?

 

To me it looks like an inkwell/pen holder and his hat is the inkwell. Is the hat hollow? If you look closely at his hands, I think he appears to be holding a pen. The holes at the back might hold pens or pencils as well. A gentleman would never set his cigars, cigarillos or cigarettes out in a holder like that as the air/humidity would dry them out and make then stale. Is the gentleman writing his memories of the war? Does this seem like a desk accessory to anyone else?

 

Think the striker area on the side, interrupting the design, means matches came into it in some way.

 

Now that you mention desk accessory, could the holes be there to hold wax sticks for seals? Back in the olden days was the wax heated with a match so you could put a glob of it on an envelope before pressing the seal? It would seem to make sense having the holes in the back because that would face the user, while the decorative side would face outward on a desk. The hat rim wouldn't interfere because when you put something in the holes they tend to slant backward anyway since there's nothing inside to hold them upright.

 

The hat looks like it was there originally. If by "bald" spot you mean the light-colored area behind his left foot, I looked at it with a magnifying glass, and it doesn't look like a repair or like anything was ever attached there -- it just doesn't have the green paint. There's a slightly raised green area in front of it that has a rougher texture than the rest of the green area under his feet, but it doesn't look like a repair either, or like anything broke off -- it's all kind of puzzling.

 

I'll post a photo tomorrow. It's hollow inside, up to whatever he's sitting on.

 

Good call.
Cigarette & match holder.....

 

It wouldn't work for cigarettes unless they're extra long. I looked up the typical length of a cigarette (3 1/4") and cut a few drinking straws to that length and found that they're too short for the top tier. The hat works for matches, though.

 

Here's a photo of the inside and a closeup of the "TF" mark you mentioned. The crack at the edge looks like something that happened when it was being made and maybe that's why the surface above it looks kind of different.

 

I get a similar issue with cameos a lot: is that some kind of signature or just random scratches on the back? The TF looks like stray paint to me.

Think there can be no doubt the hat was for holding matches, but what in the world went on the other side? Your experiment with the straws is instructive. If the objects that went into the holes were all the same length & all had diameters small enough for them to slip all the way down to the bottom, the ones inserted in the bottom tier would have been held less securely & would have been taller than those behind, not the way things in racks are usually arranged. Makes me think that whatever went in there was big enough around to snug into the holes, roughly all to the same depth & not all the way through.

So at this point I'll ask again:

Also, if the items couldn't wobble in the holes, would they have been held straight up or at a bit of an angle?

My other thought is that it was never meant when on display to be seen from both sides, that it sat with the unfinished back to a wall, with the whatevers fairly hidden.

 

Maybe it held cheroots, the predecessor to cigarettes which were larger.

 

or ciggarillos.......small cigars....