Manduela: Smooth Brandy with Bone Tobacco Pipe

Though Manduela's work is often celebrated for her Ilsted-inspired use of paneled shanks and bowl faces, she can certainly produce a beautiful Danish classic when the fancy strikes. This straight Brandy is an excellent example of that more conservative shaping style, featuring a broad, low-set waistline, a graceful, slightly curved taper up to the rim, and some wonderfully balanced proportions overall. Like many Manduela pipes, it's a smaller piece, weighing under thirty grams in total with an overall length of just over four and a half inches. That reserved scale and shaping style is, of course, compensated by a rather bold finish and color palette: a warm, strong contrast for the flame-grain-adorned stummel, a thin wafer of bone for accent, and a stem of olive-colored vulcanite. A truly beautiful piece.

- Andrew Wike