The single-owner collection brought €130,000 (£90,000) hammer and included a wide range of French pipes and pipe-bowls in clay, wood and meerschaum, but it was the ivory pipe bowl from Dieppe (c.1700), shown top right, that topped the sale.
Similar to a model in France’s SEITA (national tobacco) museum, it took a triple-estimate €9500 (£6550).
The Tajan bowl took the form of a woman in a ruff with grapes in her hair, with an adjoining horn-of-plenty ringed with exquisitely worked vine-leaves, grapes and fruit; the base of the bowl was shaped like an eagle’s head.
Meerschaum pipes dominated the Vienna sale, and there was another 170 of them available here.
Leading price was a double-estimate €4000 (£2750) on a delicately carved pipe with amber shaft by Krebs of Paris, the bowl in the form of a full-length dancing court-jester or Triboulet in ruff, doublet and striped hose, bottom right. A short, 37-lot section devoted to porcelain and ceramic pipes yielded 16 bids above the €1000 (£690) mark, mostly for pipe bowls made by German porcelain factories (Meissen, Berlin, Kloster, Veilsdorf, Nymphenburg, Volkstedt, Limbach).
Single highest price among this group was the above-estimate €3800 (£2600) bid for a 1774 Meissen model by Kändler of an Oriental lady in a gaily coloured plumed turban.
Two similar models can be found in German museum collections, though not, claimed the catalogue, with colours quite so bright.
£90,000 goes up in collectors’ smoke
AFTER the successful sale of items consigned by the Austrian State Tobacco Museum to Wiener Kunst in Vienna last October, European pipemen had another chance to add to their collections when nearly 500 pipes and pipe bowls came under the hammer at Tajan (14.35% - 20.33 % buyer’s premium) on April 26.
