Former: Smooth Bent Egg with Boxwood Tobacco Pipe

Boasting over 60 years of pipe-making experience, Hans "Former" Nielsen is regarded as a master of the Danish tradition and remains a veritable living legend. Nielsen's shaping, engineering, and finishing have become standards within the industry, with many younger pipe makers traveling to his workshop in Denmark to glean from his years of knowledge and experience. When he was just 15, Former was hired to repair pipes in Poul Rasmussen's Copenhagen pipe shop, and it was a transformative experience for Nielsen, allowing him to study a pipe's internal engineering and learning how it could be improved. He would then go on to work for W.Ø. Larsen, refining his skills, overseeing quality control, and training new carvers that joined the workshop. It was during that time that Nielsen built a workshop in his home and has been crafting Danish classics ever since with this bent Egg continuing that tradition.

It's a gestural and remarkably dynamic design, the bowl's forward-urging stance accentuated by the underside's sweeping, consistent curve. While it's a bold, muscular rendition, it's also full of grace and poise, rife with soft lines and supple curves. Cheeking around the bowl's lower flanks near the transition nicely emphasizes the bowl's affable roundness. The grain on display is simply sublime, with birdseye across the heel leading into streaks of vertical grain along the flanks before returning to more birdseye along the interior of the chamfered rim. A boxwood ring adorns the shank end, its pale coloration pairing well with the lighter hues of the contrast-stained stummel. For further compositional unity, the domed base of the saddle stem maintains the shank's shaping before reducing to a flattened configuration and curving upward toward the comfortably shaped lip button. It's a gorgeous piece from a world-class carver and will be admired for years to come.