The portrayal of commonplace objects is a familiar sight within Patrick Caulfield’s artwork. Associated with the Pop Art movement, his paintings and drawings of items such as vases, bottles, glasses and lamps demonstrate the artist’s wit towards the traditional concept of the still life. By focussing on the ‘overlooked’ Caulfield encourages his audience to look differently at the function and form of objects used daily. His deliberate flattening of each item, often reducing its shape to a purely linear outline, further separates the utility of the object from its actual role.

The repeated image of the pipe in Caulfield’s work echoes this exploration. Portraying the object as the sole focus within the work and removing it from its usual context, the viewer once again questions its importance. There is also a clear association to Belgian artist René Magritte, as the Surrealist’s work, most famously the 1929 word-play painting The Treachery of Images similarly depicts a singular smoker’s pipe alongside the words ‘ceci n’est pas un pipe’ (‘this is not a pipe’). While seemingly a contradictory declaration, Magritte’s statement that representation cannot be equivalent to that of a physical object is something which Caulfield’s Fancy Pipe suggests in its exploration of both reality and symbolism.