Tobacco pipe, clay pipe

Complete bowl. Moulded decoration: pair of tulips along bowl seams, on front only ; on the back facing the smoker, below the motto 'KICK HIM IENNY' (Jenny), two figures: to right, a male with horns, bat-like wing, long tail and hind-quarters of a goat, representing the god Pan; to left, a female with ribbons in her hair and long flowing skirt, proferring a group of three tobacco pipes, probably to be identified as the nymph Syrinx; behind her is a wine goblet. Atkinson and Oswald (1969) type 26. This rare pipe offers remarkable insights into the seedy world of pornography, tinged with wit and erudition, that characterised a certain type of gentleman's club in mid-18th-century London. The motto, KICK HIM JENNY, is the title of an erotic poem, first published in 1733 and notorious for its explicitness. It relates how an aged squire and his wife, now reduced to voyeurism as their only means of gratification, spy on an unmarried wench who yields to, and soon takes pleasure in, the advances of a virile young farmhand. On the pipe, this contemporary episode has been shifted into the Graeco-Roman bucolic landscape made famous by poets such as Theocritus or Vergil - but with a further twist. In Classical mythology, when Pan pursued the chaste nymph, Syrinx (meaning 'Pipe' in Greek), she had herself transformed into a bunch of reeds to escape his grasp. Frustrated, the lewd half-goat god blew across the reeds and so invented a new musical instrument, the Pan-pipes. But here we see the god discovering an entirely different type of pipe. It is not a clutch of flutes but three tobacco pipes that Syrinx offers her would-be lover.