Il Duca: Sandblasted Bulldog (B) Tobacco Pipe

Il Duca pipes are the brainchild of Max Rimensi, the Italian artisan having been an avid appreciator of pipes from an early age, making the process of pipe carving a natural fit given his experience working in his uncle's carpentry shop. Rimensi tirelessly studied the various minutia of the various schools of pipe making, examining every shape that he could get his hands on and visiting tobacco shops, pipe making workshops, and briar cutters, all before carving his first piece. The result of this tireless study is a shaping style that incorporates design elements from around the world, resulting in shapes such as this Bulldog.

The straight Bulldog is a profile that we've seen very seldomly from Rimensi, as his gently sinuous bent interpretations are far more well-represented in his portfolio, and this silhouette in particular is one we've never encountered before from him. Out of the various Bulldogs produced by Rimensi, this strikes me as one of the most neoclassically inclined, with a strikingly large bowl poised at the end of a sleekly tapering shank and a slim saddle stem. This stark difference in proportion places nearly all of the visual weight at the fore of this piece, eyes locked on walls over two inches tall at they flare out from a sweeping heel to a crisp beadline. Said beadline acts as the waist and is mid set, and the following taper is long and slow, keeping the two halves of the bowl relatively even with one another save for a touch of extra height lent to the top half. A wide transition leads to the shank and stem combination, their diamond-shaped outline wresting a bit of the visual weight back from the bowl and granting further firmness to the composition while still maintaining a slender elegance. One of Max's vibrant contrast stains dresses the stummel, paired to a crisp sandblast, unveiling vividly defined stacks of growth rings across the bowl, all striated by visual streaks of flame.