Still Life with Pipe and Matches (1858): Art, History and Details

Still Life with Pipe and Matches (1858) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French, 1803–1860).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The artist was a smoker. In this composition the place of honor is given to a pipe made in Austria around the middle of the 19th century. It is made of precious materials—meerschaum, silver, amber, horn, or lacquered wood—that are carefully fashioned, all lovingly rendered by the artist. The cord with a tassel (perhaps horsehair) is not just a decorative element, it is a security measure in case the precious bowl of the pipe becomes detached from the pipe stem. The pipe is surrounded by ordinary smoker's accessories—a cigar case, a snuffbox, and a match holder in porcelain—all placed on a Turkish rug. The Latin inscription translates: "Use, not abuse." In 1858 Decamps was 55 years old and not in the best of health. Perhaps a doctor had advised him to reduce his consumption of tobacco.

Object facts

• Title: Still Life with Pipe and Matches
• Date: 1858
• Creator attribution: Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French, 1803–1860)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Unframed: 63 x 38 cm (24 13/16 x 14 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1980.254.1

Collection credit

Bequest of Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.
• Herring, Sarah. The Nineteenth-Century French Paintings. London : National Gallery Company, 2019.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.