$18,000
Sold
sold
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Description
25" (63 cm.) Seated cross-legged on a
velvet-covered wooden platform is a dark
complexioned Turk wearing exotic costume of silks
and velvet with metallic trimmed slippers and red
turban,having brown glass paperweight eyes,and
original finish on his paper-mache head,leg and
hands. He holds a coffee cup in his left hand and
the mouthpiece of the pipe in his right.Movements
and Music. After winding,one would fill the hookah
with pipe tobacco,then activate the movement to
create a necessary vacuum,and finally light the
tobacco. The smoker looks side-to-side,raises the
mouthpiece and bends his head as if to
inhale,motions back and then exhales. He
intersperses his smoking with raising the coffee
cup to his mouth for a sip. The figure smokes
through a kidskin bellows that pulls the pipe
smoke from a tube leading up to his right arm and
expels the smoke from a tube leading to mouth. The
piece contains the fully original clockwork
mechanism with a musical movement playing "Ca
c'est une chose" and "C'est Paris"; both music and
mechanism function superbly. Leopold
Lambert,Paris,circa 1890,model #28 in the Lambert
catalog,named "Turc Fumeur",and likely designed to
appeal to an affluent international tourist such
as a visitor to the 1889 Paris International
Exposition.