Auction Barton

22 September 2020

Although most of the famous Barton collection was already sold at auction in 2010, a new group of pipes came up for auction quite unexpectedly. A wide variety of pipes were offered in more than sixty lots, from porcelain and meerschaum to ethnographic material. As to be expected, this included numerous interesting objects for our collection. We purchased a total of twenty objects, mainly ethnographic. The masterpiece in it is a tobacco pipe from Siberia made of mammoth ivory, a rare object that we were never able to acquire. The pedigree of this specimen is particularly interesting, Barton had taken over the piece from Alfred Dunhill's collection. The pipe was considered special even a hundred years ago, and it is not without reason that it is pictured on the dust cover of Dunhill's standard work.

News archive