19th-Century Carved Meerschaum Pipes

19th-century carved meerschaum pipes are considered the branch of pipe making that came closest to small-scale sculpture. Meerschaum extracted from the mines of the Eskişehir plain was largely sent to Central Europe as raw nodules, where it was carved one piece at a time by hand in workshops there into objects with a face, a scene, and a story. The scale, division of labor, and repertoire of motifs of this branch can today be traced largely through the exhibition records and trade press of the period; the common view holds that the golden age began around 1850 and lasted until roughly 1920.

What the Material Allows

Meerschaum, mineralogically named sepiolite, is soft enough to scratch with a fingernail; its Mohs hardness is given at around 2. In its porous dry mass, specific gravity has been measured between 0.988 and 1.279, meaning a piece can float in water. This combination of softness and lightness allowed crowded figure groups to be carved from a single piece of stone and let the blade work down to the scale of a strand of hair, a fold of cloth, a leaf vein.

Preparation and finishing were likewise done by hand. The red earthy crust on the nodule as it came from the mine was scraped off, the stone dried, scraped again, then waxed. Once the carving was finished the piece was smoothed with sandpaper, heated in wax or stearin, and finally polished with bone ash. The workshop's waste was also put to use: dust and chips collected under the blade were compressed with a binder to produce pressed meerschaum (massa). This mixture is heavier and denser than block stone and is not considered suitable for fine carving.

Workshops and Division of Labor

Vienna is regarded as the main center of carved meerschaum work throughout the century; workshops in Budapest, Nuremberg, Paris, London, and New York were also part of the same network. Records indicate that toward the end of the century roughly 150 masters and 800 journeymen made their living from this trade in Austria, and around three hundred carvers did so in the United States; estimates for the workshop population in Germany run to a few thousand. The workforce was drawn from two paths: some trained in technical schools or fine-arts education, others learned the trade directly at a master's side. In New York, the most visible address for this trade was the Kaldenberg workshop.

Not all production was at this level. Countless copies of a handful of motifs — deer, dogs, horses, and eagle claws — flooded the market as cheap goods in the same years. For mouthpieces, amber was the period's most prestigious material.

Exhibition Pipes

The great exhibitions were the showcase where workshops measured themselves against one another. A silver-framed bowl from Nuremberg carved with a saint-and-dragon scene entered the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. The display cases of the 1862 London International Exhibition held scenes taken from a Shakespeare play and crowded compositions with horse-drawn carriages. New York's Kaldenberg & Son took part in the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition with thirty pieces. Period histories written on the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition cite Austrian meerschaum goods as a separate group: portraits of famous figures, folk types, animal and bird figures, hunting and historical scenes.

According to newspaper reports of the time, a set prepared for the 1889 Paris Exposition carried head-and-shoulder portraits of US presidents from George Washington to Benjamin Harrison on separate bowls, worked from steel engravings. The giant bowl displayed at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago depicted Columbus's landing with more than twenty figures; it is reported that the stone for this piece was specially brought from Turkey.

A Legend and the End of an Era

According to a piece that appeared in an American pipe magazine in 1949, the French sculptor Pierre Paul Puget (1620-1694) carved a multi-figure meerschaum pipe in 1652. Pipe historians do not accept this account: the first recorded use of meerschaum as a pipe material dates to around 1723, roughly thirty years after Puget's death.

The end of the golden age came with a change of material. As briar spread in the second half of the 19th century as a cheap, durable option, labor-intensive carving declined; this shift is covered in the Briar Revolution entry. For the craft's continuity in Anatolia, see the Eskişehir meerschaum carving entry.