Famous pipe smokers

Vincent Van Gogh, Gustave Courbet, George Sand, Orson Welles, Georges Brassens, Bertrand Blier and Jacques Tati among the artists. Sherlock Holmes and Jules Maigret among the fictional characters. What do they have in common? All of them are pipe smokers.

There are first of all those we can hardly picture without a pipe. Brassens carried his even onto television sets, at a time when people smoked everywhere. Bertrand Blier, like his father Bernard, is seen with his on the sets of his films. Orson Welles did the same in his day. And who does not remember Jacques Tati, whose photograph showing him with a pipe in his mouth caused a stir and raised the question of an overly literal application of the Évin law, the French statute that set out to ban tobacco from all advertising.

Sherlock Holmes and Jules Maigret, created respectively by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Georges Simenon, do their thinking with a pipe between their lips. The object takes on a particular meaning there, as though it served the two investigators’ reasoning. Smoking amounts here to taking a pause, a moment in which the facts can be more easily picked apart, analysed and cross-checked until the hypothesis that unties the plot emerges from the curls of smoke.

Then there are the painters who committed themselves to canvas with their pipe, fixing their image as smokers for centuries to come. Van Gogh is one of them, as is Gustave Courbet.

And finally there is the use of the pipe as a way of asserting oneself. Take the case of George Sand, the celebrated woman of letters who tried, with some success, to make a place for herself in a period and a world that were exclusively male. For her, claiming her status as a woman equal to men went, among other things, through the use of the pipe, which, being as unusual as it was sensual in her hands, unsettled many of her contemporaries.

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