Famous Pipe Smokers

Famous pipe smokers form a broad gallery of portraits showing that the pipe is not merely a tool for smoking tobacco but also a powerful bearer of image. Many well-known figures, from scientists to novelists, from generals to film stars, are remembered by their pipe; and some of the most enduring examples of this image belong not to real people at all, but to fictional heroes. This entry summarizes the relationship between the pipe and public identity through examples that can be verified with sources.

Two Portraits from Science and Art

In 1950, at 71, Albert Einstein accepted lifetime membership in the Montreal Pipe Smokers' Club. On that occasion he said he believed pipe smoking "contributes to a calm and objective judgment in human affairs" — a widely quoted line, though it is a personal opinion of the speaker and his era, not a scientific finding. The physicist's pipe, its mouthpiece worn through from long use, is preserved today in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington.

In a letter to his brother Theo in December 1875, Vincent van Gogh wrote of rediscovering in his pipe "an old, faithful friend." Three weeks after the incident in which he cut off part of his ear, in January 1889, he painted himself with his pipe: "Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe" is considered the best-known record of the painter's bond with his pipe.

Literature's Devotees

Mark Twain was an inveterate smoker; being pictured with cheap corncob pipes became an inseparable part of his public image. The famous remark attributed to him — that if smoking is not allowed in heaven, he would rather not go — is also credited to him, though no primary source for the line has ever been produced.

J.R.R. Tolkien, meanwhile, carried his passion for the pipe into his fiction: the hobbits of Middle-earth smoke "pipe-weed." The appendices of The Lord of the Rings note that this plant is probably a species of tobacco (Nicotiana). In the story, pipe-weed is said to have first been cultivated around Shire year 1070 by Tobold Hornblower of Longbottom; Longbottom Leaf, Old Toby, and Southern Star are its best-known varieties.

In Uniform and on the Silver Screen

General Douglas MacArthur's long-stemmed corncob pipe became synonymous with Second World War photographs. The Missouri Meerschaum company produced a special long-stemmed model bearing the general's name. Singer and actor Bing Crosby was also seen with his pipe in films and photographs; the pipe is considered part of his "comfortable family man" image.

Fiction's Most Famous Pipe

The most famous person associated with a pipe probably never lived at all. In Arthur Conan Doyle's texts, Sherlock Holmes smokes clay, cherrywood, and briar pipes; the large, downward-curving calabash pipe identified with him never appears in any of the stories. This image comes from William Gillette, the actor who played Holmes onstage roughly 1,300 times between 1899 and 1932: the downward-curving calabash could be picked out from the back rows and also stayed balanced in the mouth as the actor delivered his lines. Illustrator Frederic Dorr Steele basing his Holmes drawings for Collier's magazine on Gillette's stage appearance cemented this image.

Popular compendiums also mention other names, such as J.M. Barrie, Bertrand Russell, Georges Simenon, and Norman Rockwell. For the meanings the pipe acquired across different eras and geographies, see the entry on the world history of the pipe.