19Th-Century Carved Meerschaum Pipes

19th-century carved meerschaum pipes are considered the branch of pipe making that came closest to small-scale sculpture. Meerschaum extracted from the mines of the Eskişehir plain was largely sent to Central Europe as raw nodules, where it was carved one piece at a time by hand in workshops there into objects with a face, a scene, and a story.

The scale, division of labor, and repertoire of motifs of this branch can today be traced largely through the exhibition records and trade press of the period; the common view holds that the golden age began around 1850 and lasted until roughly 1920.

What the Material Allows

Meerschaum, mineralogically named sepiolite, is soft enough to scratch with a fingernail; its Mohs hardness is given at around 2. In its porous dry mass, specific gravity has been measured between 0.988 and 1.279, meaning a piece can float in water. This combination of softness and lightness allowed crowded figure groups to be carved from a single piece of stone and let the blade work down to the scale of a strand of hair, a fold of cloth, a leaf vein.

Preparation and finishing were likewise done by hand. The red earthy crust on the nodule as it came from the mine was scraped off, the stone dried, scraped again, then waxed. Once the carving was finished the piece was smoothed with sandpaper, heated in wax or stearin, and finally polished with bone ash. The workshop's waste was also put to use: dust and chips collected under the blade were compressed with a binder to produce pressed meerschaum (massa). This mixture is heavier and denser than block stone and is not considered suitable for fine carving.