Amsterdam Pipe Museum 2.73

The Amsterdam Pipe Museum is a museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, dedicated to smoking pipes, tobacco, and related paraphernalia. It holds the national reference collection in these areas.The permanent exhibition of the Amsterdam Pipe Museum displays over 2,000 items representing the variety of smoking pipes and utensils that have been used in all parts of the world over the past 25 centuries.HistoryThe Amsterdam Pipe Museum was founded as a private collection in 1969. From 1975 to 1982 the collection was on display in an art gallery at Frederiksplein, Amsterdam. The focus was mainly on clay tobacco pipes for which Holland has been famous.In 1982 the Pijpenkabinet moved to Leiden, where it functioned as a public museum until 1995. The collection was enlarged with historic and ethnographic items. The museum actively published its scientific historic research.In 1995 the Pijpenkabinet moved to its present location in Amsterdam. It can be found in a typical Amsterdam canal house along the Prinsengracht, between the Leidseplein and the National Museum . The museum now shows all sorts of pipes, including works-of-art like the carved meerschaum pipes and hand-painted porcelain pipe bowls.When the Niemeyer tobacco museum in Groningen shut down in 2011, the Amsterdam Pipe Museum acquired some four hundred items from its collection before the rest was auctioned off, stating that its acquisition preserved the "core" of the former museum's collection.