Pipe Box

A talented woodcarver decorated this pipe box with an unidentified monogram and quatrefoil reserves depicting grotesqueries.With wild hair, claws, or hooves, these grotesques play with smoking pipes in a bawdy manner, an allusion to the function of the box.

Specialized carvers in the city of Nancy produced this box and others like it from a hard, dense variety of cherry wood known as bois de Sainte-Lucie (after a local convent). The industry flourished in the late 1600s and early 1700s, when Louis XIV decreed that small, personal objects such as vessels and toilette sets could no longer be made of precious metal; he needed the silver and gold to finance his wars. Patrons in the 1700s valued items produced from this wood for their deep reddish-brown color; lustrous, polished surface; they also admired decoration that imitated contemporary metalwork.