American Estates: Todd Johnson Smooth Cavalier with Bamboo (Hoplite) (2005) Tobacco Pipe

Over his two decades of crafting highly sculptural and intensely creative pipes, Todd Johnson has built a reputation as one of the premier carvers in America. It's a well-earned reputation, one that Johnson took great care to accrue over his time plying his craft, making sure to painstakingly engineer and shape his designs to the best of his ability. His masters degree in aesthetics from Yale certainly helped, but it was his pilgrimage to Denmark that truly set Johnson on his pipe making journey. Long before the wide-spread use of the internet and before it was fashionable to do so, Johnson went to Denmark to study and speak with Danish masters of the craft like Tom Eltang and Anne Julie. It was there that he learned the importance of not just making a pipe aesthetically beautiful, but also highly functional.

This Cavalier is a distinctive, eye-catching design, and like any Cavalier, the continuous shank extends past the transition and makes up the broader scaffolding to which the bowl is affixed. Here, the bowl is presented as chalice-like in its shaping, upheld and distanced from the rest of the composition. Though mimicking the appearance of the Cavalier's foot cap, this piece does not possesses the continuous drilling or moisture cap, but Johnson makes up for this by incorporating nine knuckles of bamboo across the shank, the warm, naturalistic quality of the material instantly brightening the overall composition. The stummel wears a warm, traditional smooth finish that showcases a handsome assortment of grain, while a saddle stem of jet-black vulcanite tops off the design and makes a subtle downturn for a comfortable smoking posture. Lengthy, sculptural, and bearing Johnson's Hoplite grade, this 2005 piece is sure to be a welcome find for those who cherish elegance in their pipe designs.