French Art Deco Pipes With a Ball-Shaped Chamber

French Art Deco pipes with a ball-shaped chamber are a small group of pipes made in workshops around Paris in the first quarter of the twentieth century, fitting none of the established shape systems entirely. The shared description runs as follows: a slim body twelve to thirteen centimetres long, a meerschaum bowl at one end, a yellow amber mouthpiece at the other, and a silver or gold ball right at the center.

The ball is not decorative; once its screw cap is removed it opens into a small chamber, dividing the pipe in two.

The Paris Workshops and the Period

Every firm known to have made this design is of French origin. Lancel began in 1876 as a small Paris shop opened by Angèle and Alphonse Lancel, selling pipes and smoking accessories; though the firm shifted its focus toward leather goods after the 1880s, pieces with the ball chamber signed "A. Lancel" and addressed on boulevard Montmartre are dated to the 1910s and 1920s. Sommer Frères, founded according to records in the 1860s, was another Paris firm running both a factory and a retail shop; an example of the same design dated to around 1925 is attributed to this name. Similar pieces stamped GBD are also known. The ball construction wasn't confined to pipes alone; it was also applied to cigarette holders of the period. Some of these pieces survive with their original boxes, embossed on the lining with the maker's or retailer's mark; in one reported example, this embossing points to an address in the Passage des Panoramas, Paris's oldest covered arcade, opened in 1800. The style's name fits the same frame: "Art Deco" takes its name from the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, held in Paris in 1925; the term itself only became widespread as a period label around the 1960s.