Antoniewski (Bartłomiej Antoniewski)

Antoniewski is the name given to the pipes of Bartłomiej Antoniewski, who works in the city of Przemyśl in southeastern Poland. The maker has long marketed his products under the name artpipes. The workshop's best-known face is carving: animal and plant motifs, hunting scenes, and geometric and abstract arrangements worked into the bowl surface. In this respect it is considered part of Eastern Europe's figural carving tradition.

The Maker and the Workshop

The maker's year of birth is given as 1961. It is known both from his own account and from the local press that he began working briar in 1984; he is said to have carved a pirate's head for his first pipe, a piece now displayed in Przemyśl's Bell and Pipe Museum. It has further been confirmed that he was a student of Ryszard Filar, the city's well-known master; according to the records, this apprenticeship dates to 1985-1986.

He established his own business in 1989. That date coincides with the period when private enterprise was again permitted in Poland; a good many workshops, large and small, opened in Przemyśl during those same years. Antoniewski's work went on to win several awards at the major pipe shows in Memphis and Kansas in the years that followed.

The workshop's preferred material is Mediterranean briar. Acrylic, cumberland, and ebonite are used for the mouthpieces; the differences among these three materials are discussed in the entry on mouthpiece materials. Production relies on piece-by-piece hand shaping rather than serial molds, so no two examples of the same model come out identical.