Black-baked standard Gouda pipe

August 2013

Of all Gouda pipes, the standard pipe has been the most general and also the most popular. With its long, delicate stem of half a meter and beautiful oval-shaped bowl, it was a worldwide trade success. This particular pipe was made by Jan Prince & Cie in Gouda, one of the most important nineteenth-century factories. A fish, flounder, in Dutch called both, is applied as a heel stamp, which is not Prince’s best mark, that are the milkmaid and the lion in the Dutch garden. Despite the somewhat lower status of the mark, the pipe is of optimum quality, with a beautifully balanced bowl shape that has been carefully stroke burnished and a perfect straight stem. Rare in this case is the black-fired colour, a more luxurious version than the white one because the saggars were filled with sawdust before firing, which caused the white clay turning black by nip and smolder. It is often claimed that black pipes were only intended for funerals, but that is not true. This pipe, for example, with a handwritten name on the bowl, stood in a pipe rack of a Dutch family. The gentleman of the house welcomed his friends and offered them a smoke, other than his own. The date is somewhere in the nineteenth century, at least before the year 1897 when the Prince factory closed its doors.

Amsterdam Pipe Museum APM 21.644

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