It is one of life’s smouldering ironies that smoking tobacco damages the body while holding a pipe sharpens the mind. “The pipe,” the British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray once wrote, “draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher and shuts up the mouths of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected.” Nor was Thackeray alone in thinking so. Albert Einstein insisted pipes were instrumental in teasing out “calm and objective judgement in all human affairs”, while Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary invention, Sherlock Holmes, famously measured out the complexity of crime in pinches and puffs: “it is quite a three-pipe problem”.

Curved quizzically into question marks, pipes are the very shape of thought. They are as temperamentally transformative as they are physically compromising. If a writer or artist wants to interject an air of meditation into a scene, the interposition of a pipe is the shortest of shorthands for doing so. The Dutch Old Masters made great use of the pipe smoker, and later artists such as Paul Cézanne and James McNeill Whistler would recast him as an allegory of life’s slow exhalation into air. (Vincent van Gogh auditioned himself several times in the role of the pipe-wielding contemplative.)