Large wooden tobacco pipe, bowl with elaborately decorated metal cap, and stem end, possibly Italian, 1850-1900

Carved into a horn shape from wood, this tobacco pipe bowl was said to have been used by the Chairman of the Students’ Smoking Club at Oxford or Cambridge University. Pipe smoking in the Victorian period was very much portrayed as a gentlemanly pursuit.

Tobacco pipe bowls come in a range of designs, from the simple to, as here, the highly extravagant. Such outlandish and impractical bowls are likely to have been given as gifts or perhaps as souvenirs. (Pictured here with two other tobacco pipe bowls, A14527 and A26495).