The Pipe in Art and Literature

The pipe in art and literature has been painted and written about for four centuries not merely as an object but as a carrier of meaning. In the painter's or the writer's hand, the pipe is at times a reminder of life's brevity, at times the standard prop of the thinking man, and at times the single stroke that defines a character.

In Painting: A Warning Made of Smoke

After tobacco spread across Europe, pipe-smoking figures multiplied rapidly in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting. Adriaen Brouwer and Adriaen van Ostade, who trained in the circle of Frans Hals, are counted among the artists who placed ordinary pipe-smokers in tavern and village scenes at the center of the canvas. Many of these paintings do more than record daily life; by the moral standards of the time they also carry a warning against excessive pleasure. Smoke that quickly disperses is read, in the vanitas tradition, as the visual counterpart of life's transience.

19. th century, the emphasis shifted. Vincent van Gogh's self-portrait, painted in Arles in January 1889, showing him with a bandaged ear and a pipe, suggests that the pipe had become a mark of an inward state rather than a moral lesson. Of the two bandaged self-portraits he made in the weeks after injuring his ear, the one with the pipe is in a private collection and is only rarely exhibited; the other version of the bandaged self-portrait is at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Paul Cézanne's The Card Players series, worked on between 1890 and 1895, builds the same quiet attentiveness. In the first two of the five finished canvases, a man with a pipe stands beside the players; the study he made for this figure, Man with a Pipe, is associated with the series.

The best-known painting on the subject, though, is René Magritte's 1929 work La trahison des images. Beneath a meticulously rendered pipe are the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"), because the object on the canvas cannot be smoked — it is only a representation. Held in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the work has become one of the most cited images in modern art for the way it interrogates the relationship between word and image.

In Literature: An Extension of Character

In literature the pipe is often used as a device that measures the length of thought. In Arthur Conan Doyle's 1891 story "The Red-Headed League," Sherlock Holmes describes a puzzle as "a three pipe problem" and asks not to be disturbed for fifty minutes. Sidney Paget, who illustrated the first editions of the stories, drew Holmes with a straight pipe; the curved calabash shape that comes to mind today actually comes from the stage rather than the text. This shape is generally attributed to the American actor William Gillette, who played the character hundreds of times; according to the story, a curved pipe was preferred because it could be held between the teeth while delivering lines and gesturing, making both easier. Since no period photograph or direct testimony confirms that Gillette actually used a calabash on stage, the connection cannot be taken as certain. The staying power of this visual template can also be traced in later collections such as the Peterson Sherlock Holmes series.

The same function persists in other narratives: in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, the pipe is a detail that conveys a people's temperament and everyday rhythm; the scope of this detail is covered in the entry Pipes and Pipe-weed in The Lord of the Rings. For the particular place meerschaum has held in poetry and prose, see Meerschaum in Literature. The public image real people have built around the pipe is gathered under famous pipe smokers.