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.

1. 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.