Lanier (Paul Lanier)

Lanier is the signature carrying the name of French pipe carver Paul Lanier. Lanier is remembered as one of the few masters who kept figurative pipe carving alive in an era dominated by series production, and is counted among the most recognized figures of the late twentieth century in the town of Saint-Claude, the craft's center.

From Wood Sculpture to Pipes

Lanier was born in Pierre-de-Bresse, in the Saône-et-Loire département of Burgundy; sources give his birth year as either 1931 or 1932. He began not with pipes but with furniture carving: at fourteen or fifteen he entered an apprenticeship in Chalon-sur-Saône, spending four years on modeling, drawing, and carving, and earning a vocational qualification in wood sculpture. This training would prove the defining trait of his later work; Lanier approached the pipe less as a smoking implement than as a small-scale sculpture.

He set up his own business in 1955; in the early years what he produced was not pipes but carved gift items. He learned to adapt the craft to pipes under a maker named Epely in Saint-Claude. He then worked for a long stretch as an independent subcontractor: he is said to have produced around five thousand pieces a year for Butz-Choquin, doing the rough and intermediate work at his own bench and leaving the finishing to the factory. From the 1980s on he moved to working entirely under his own name.