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Revised for 2023 from an article published in May, 2021, this post has been updated to include additional information.
Vincent van Gogh remains one of the most famous and influential figures in the history of western art, with his creative output continually impressing modern critics and capturing the attention of even the most casual of art fans. The Dutch painter's work is displayed around the world in museums and galleries, with each piece providing a glimpse into the life of a complicated man who was plagued by poverty, mental illness, and depression.
Pipe smoking is prominently displayed in several of Van Gogh's self-portraits, sketches, and still-life paintings. While books, academic papers, and artistic discussions explore Van Gogh's influence and techniques, little attention has been paid to his love for pipe smoking, the depiction of pipes in his work, or the impact of pipe smoking on his mood. Van Gogh found solace in pipe smoking, referring to his pipe in an 1875 letter as "an old, trusty friend, and I imagine we'll never part again."
Self portrait, 1886
A 2020 article in The Art Newspaper written by Van Gogh specialist and investigative reporter, Martin Bailey, examined the role of pipes in Vincent's artistic works and personal life, citing Van Gogh's personal letters and themes within his work as evidence. "Although most aspects of Van Gogh's life have been endlessly explored since his death, the role of his pipe has received relatively scant attention. But smoking, for Vincent, was vital, since he regarded it as a source of consolation when tackling the endless challenges he faced."
Bailey notes that others weren't fond of Van Gogh's pipe smoking: "While working as a teacher in Isleworth, west London, aged 23, his landlady Annie Slade-Jones complained about the smell of his smoking. He therefore gave her scented violets: 'I bought some for Mrs. Jones to make up for the pipe I smoke here now and then, mostly late in the evening in the playground. The tobacco here is rather strong, though.'"
Bailey recounted another anecdote: "In a little-known reminiscence, a retired tailor from the Van Gogh family's village of Helvoirt once remembered cleaning Vincent's clothes during a Christmas visit. 'The suit stank of smoke and was completely unpresentable,' 70-year-old Frederick van de Plas told a Dutch writer in the 1920s."
... smoking, for Vincent, was vital, since he regarded it as a source of consolation
While Van Gogh experienced little success during his lifetime and sold few paintings, Bailey notes that "on one occasion in 1884 he apparently gave a painting to the Eindhoven tobacconist Jansje van den Broek to settle a bill. This picture, Watermill at Gennep, was bought by Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza at Sotheby's in 1996 — for £552,000." Van Gogh also paid tribute to his late father, with Bailey noting, "After Vincent's father Theodorus died of a stroke in 1885 he painted a memorial still life which included the deceased's pipe and tobacco pouch. Van Gogh later reused the canvas, to save money, but a watercolour sketch survives."
Van Gogh's pipes were his lifelong companions, right up until his final hours. Bailey's article notes, "After wounding himself from a revolver shot on 27 July 1890, he staggered back to his garret bedroom in the small inn. When Dr. Paul Gachet arrived, Van Gogh asked for his pipe, which was still in his waistcoat pocket. Vincent began to smoke in silence. A day later he was dead."
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
Smoking was a recurring theme in Van Gogh's work, with his piece Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette being one of his most iconic and enduring paintings. The work was most likely completed while Van Gogh was staying in Antwerp sometime between 1885-86, attending the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Skeletons were often used at the academy for students to better understand human anatomy in addition to studying live models. The Van Gogh Museum website notes that the painting was "likely meant as a kind of joke, and probably also as a comment on conservative academic practice."
One of Vincent's most famous paintings, Van Gogh's Chair (1888), is viewed by Bailey as a memorial of sorts: "On the straw seat, recalling an absent sitter, lies his trusty pipe and packet of tobacco. This vignette represents a highly personal still life in a painting which is itself a symbolic self-portrait." Many Van Gogh paintings prominently feature pipes, such as his many Self-Portrait with Pipe paintings, as well as his Still Life with Straw Hat, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, Still Life with Drawing Board, Pipe, Onions and Sealing-Wax, and Head of a Peasant with a Pipe.
Van Gogh's Influence on Modern Pipe Making
Pipes depicted in Van Gogh's paintings have notably been reimagined by Italian pipe maker Ser Jacopo as a part of their Picta series, which also features stylized versions of pipes seen in famous works by other renowned painters such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and René Magritte. The Picta line offers creative renditions of pipes seen in iconic paintings, incorporating Ser Jacopo's tasteful use of accenting materials and their often whimsical, distinctive Pesaro pipe-making style perhaps best known for its flowing lines and dramatic flourishes.
Van Gogh's pipes were his lifelong companions, right up until his final hours
The original Picta line was made up of 16 shapes, each taken from different works by Van Gogh before being expanded to include the range of other artists. As the series became more successful, the Picta Van Gogh line was made into its own branch of the greater Picta series, and was later expanded with three additional shapes for a total of 19. Each is a unique example of both Ser Jacopo's pipe-making style and Van Gogh's perspective on the world while painting.
The Post-Impressionist style of his work embodied bold choices in both color and brushwork, with specific attention paid to imaginative perspectives in both a linear sense and a more metaphorical one, as faces, objects, and landscapes were carefully altered by the artist to produce wholly original compositions. Outside of smoking's personal connection to Vincent's life and work, the paintings he produced which feature pipes and smoking lend insight to the style of pipes smoked while he was alive, with a great variety of tavern-style clay pipes and pipes made from cherrywood represented throughout his oeuvre. His series of works that focused on peasants and the lower class showcase this style of pipe predominantly, as does Van Gogh's Chair, and a wealth of his own self portraits.
Ser Jacopo: Picta Van Gogh
The Avant-Garde nature of Van Gogh's works have lent the depicted pipes an air of whimsy, the forms rendered bringing to mind the concept of Ostranenie, or defamiliarization, as they present these everyday objects in new and unfamiliar ways. It's this same spirit that the late Giancarlo Guidi's Picta designs embody, translating the painted visions of archaic clay and cherry pipes into briar, all suffused with the Pesaro school's singular style. Ser Jacopo's portrayals of the pipes Vincent painted take their subject matter seriously, and Guidi's deep appreciation for art and the arts is immediately apparent even at first glance.
Van Gogh's representations of clay pipes feature the style's often curved stems, usually in the iconic aquiline arch of the contemporary Hawkbill, and with a variety of bowl styles surrounded by differing intensities of light and a wide array of material backgrounds. This wealth of diversity has allowed for a good bit of interpretation in the way Ser Jacopo has styled their counterparts to Van Gogh's pipes, his brush strokes reflected in contours of briar as areas of dark and light become capped flares and tapers, evidenced in the fourth entrant into the Picta series: Based on Vincent's Farmer's Head With Terracotta Pipe from 1885, this pipe takes the form of a muscular Cutty with a sleek taper from transition to button, its junction marked by silver and its bowl resting on a short spur as a stylized rim presides over all.
The Avant-Garde nature of Van Gogh's works have lent the depicted pipes an air of whimsy
Other standout pipes from the Picta Van Gogh line include the 9, a plump and supple Hawkbill with a beadline-wrapped rim and ornate silver junction accent, the 12, an Acorn with an Egg-like bowl and a rounded spur based on Van Gogh's Chair, and the 16, A Hawkbill-like bent Dublin with a beadline at the rim, ornate silverwork, and a sleekly tapering shank. A look through the series as a whole reveals the commendable faithfulness with which many of these pipes have been designed, several of which fall well outside of the workshop's expected style, presenting as classic shapes with subtle alterations to their proportions. Likewise, the more unconventional designs in the line remain quite true to their painted doppelgangers, and Ser Jacopo's Pesaro style does well to breathe life into what were once representations on canvas.
The Smoker (Le Fumeur), 1888
The parallels between the works in Ser Jacopo's Picta series and those by Van Gogh himself are almost poetic: the artist finding solace and inspiration in his pipes and the pipes of others, and the pipe maker, in turn, finding inspiration in those pipes painted by the artist. In this way, pipes can be considered a muse of sorts, and Van Gogh's oeuvre attests to that assertion: his pipes provided him with constant companionship which he found just as reliable, if not more, than any human.
Several of Van Gogh's personal letters mention pipe smoking, the majority of them written to his younger brother Theo as well as close friends. In a letter to his brother, Vincent wrote "I shall again sleep little tonight because of the drawing; but it is very cosy smoking a pipe in the night, when everything is quiet; and daybreak and sunrise are wonderful." In another correspondence, Vincent informed his brother of an encounter with tax assessors: "Then they sent me assessments and summonses, but I didn't pay the slightest attention, and once when they came to ask about them, I said it was simply no use, I'd lit my pipe with them. That I didn't have the money, and that my four chairs and table wouldn't bring anything — that even new, they weren't worth what they had assessed me for."
In one letter to Émile Bernard, Van Gogh wrote, "The most beautiful paintings are those one dreams of while smoking a pipe in one's bed, but which one doesn't make. But it's a matter of attacking them nevertheless, however incompetent one may feel vis-à-vis the ineffable perfections of nature's glorious splendours."
Van Gogh offered advice to his brother in another letter: "Theo, I must again recommend that you start smoking a pipe. It does you a lot of good when you're out of spirits, as I quite often am nowadays."
Vincent later wrote to Theo about his hopeful outcomes while tirelessly working on pieces:
The one thing I do hope is that by working hard I shall have enough pictures at the end of a year to have a show if I want to, or, if you wish it, at the time of the exhibition. I am not set on it myself, but what I am set on is showing you something that is not wholly bad.
I need not exhibit, but we would have work of mine that would prove I am neither a slacker or a good-for-nothing and I should be content. But the main thing is, I think, that I must not take less trouble than the painters who are working expressly for it.
Whether one exhibits or doesn't exhibit, one must produce, and after that one has the right to smoke one's pipe in peace.
In a letter to a friend, Van Gogh outlined his daily ritual to stave off depression and suicidal thoughts: "It consists of a glass of wine, a piece of bread with cheese and a pipe of tobacco. This is not complicated, you will tell me, and you will hardly be able to believe that this is the limit to which melancholy will take me; all the same, at some moments — oh dear me."
"The most beautiful paintings are those one dreams of while smoking a pipe in one's bed"
In a compilation of letters titled The Letters of a Post-Impressionist, Van Gogh expressed what he believed it takes to be productive, writing, "In order to work well, one must be well lodged, well fed, and able to smoke one's pipe and drink one's coffee in peace. I do not wish to imply that there are not many other good things; let everyone do as he pleases; but my system seems to me better than many others." As pipe smokers, many of us have our own system that works and affords us the opportunity to relax, and for someone like Vincent van Gogh, pipe smoking was a source of happiness and an inspiration behind some of art's most beloved paintings.
Bibliography
- "Van Gogh's trusty pipe: how the artist believed that smoking helped his art", theartnewspaper.com
- The Letters of a Post-impressionist: Being the Familiar Correspondence of Vincent Van Gogh (1913) by Vincent van Gogh, Anthony Mario Ludovici
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Comments
I truly enjoyed this article. As a person who enjoys both painting and my pipes, it is interesting to me that the pipe can make such a wonderful impact on a person’s life. All of what this fine artist says about the PIPE, is certainly true. I think I will go light my next smoke, now. Thank you SMOKING PIPES for these great overviews.
What a great piece! Van Gogh is one of my favorite painters. Thank you for highlighting the importance of his pipe for him. It really is the simple things that can help someone out when things are really going poorly.
Viewing Van Goghs paintings are one of the few things that give me as much pleasure as smoking a pipe does. I cherish both.
....excellent piece on van gogh!!!!
Awesome piece, Mr.Sitts. 3 good films on Van Gogh: Loving Vincent, At Eternity's Gate, and Painted with Words. 3 artists that influenced my drawing in highschool: Salvador Dali, Pushead, Norman Rockwell, and Vincent Van Gogh (I guess that's 4. I told myself that I would quit committing CUI/ Commenting Under The Influence, but I seem to most always be under the influence), all of who I would love to smoke a pipe with, have a drink, and maybe get some lessons.
This was a good read. Unique insight.
Funny Van Gogh nod in the movie NOBODY when Hutch burns Yulian's money and art stash. He manages to walk out with an uzi a blazin' and carrying a Van Gogh painting under his arm as he leaves the carnage... priceless 🔥
For me, the most emotional episode ever of Dr. Who is when they meet Van Gogh, and at the end bring him forward in time briefly to hear a lecture at an art museum about how great and how much loved he is today. That 'if only he could have known' moment fulfilled.
This was a great read. Thank you so much for sharing. I enjoyed watching the movie "Loving Vincent ". This piece brought me back to it again.