Old Violins by H. R. Haweis

Italy and Germany have to look back to their golden age, but it seems as if France and England had to look forward.

France and England have never yet gone beyond a doubtful silver age, but there is good reason to think that the manipulation and alchemy of time, whilst thinning out by wear and tear and loss the older gems, will not only transform the Piques and Lupôts, and perhaps the Vuillaumes and Chanots, but also the Banks, Forsters, and Fendts, and probably the Dukes and Hills, into golden quality, with very advanced prices; and so, instead of being, like Artemus Ward's future, _behind_ them, they may still be found to have their future _before_ them.

The French work contemporaneous with the Cremona period is not nearly so interesting, nor do the makers appear to have been nearly so capable as the men who followed them towards the close of the seventeen hundreds. This is no doubt accounted for by the streams of violins pouring out of the Italian and German workshops, the superior reputation of Cremona, which drew at once the patronage of the Spanish and French Courts, and perhaps the small demand for stringed instruments in France compared with the huge demand in Italy and throughout Germany.

So there was a poor market as yet for French work.

In Italy, in the luxurious little Duchies and Principalities, as well as in the churches, and in Germany in the small Electorates, each of which supported its band and gave an indirect impetus to the churches, Reformed and Roman Catholic, violin-making flourished, and so it came to pass that Italy and Germany made for all the world.

The Cremona period in France can boast of but two considerable names, Jacques Boquay (1705-30) and Pieray (1700-25). Boquay worked on the early Cremonese model, which had already been left behind by the modified forms of Stradivari (1700 great period). His violins have not yet reached a high selling figure, but may possibly rise; they are by no means scarce; his varnish is reddish-brown, transparent, warm and soft. He reverted to the Jerome Amati type, arching even a little more than Jerome.

The quality of his tone is good, but it lacks power, which in these advanced days tells against him except for cabinet playing.

Claude Pieray (1700-25) worked in Paris, and followed the later Amati contour, but he was far enough removed from the Cremonese influence to follow a line of his own. Whilst varying, some think capriciously, the thickness of his wood, and not always securing the best quality of wood, he varnished pale red, and turned out a small and large pattern; but he evidently inclined to the larger pattern of the late Amati Strad.

A violin of Pieray's was advertised in the sale of Tom Britton, the musical coal-heaver, as "a very beautiful violin, and _as good as a Cremona_," which shows that even at that date the Stainer influence, then so strong in England, had not dimmed the fame of Cremona. However, it would of course have been absurd to compare him to Stainer, the affinity between Pieray and Amati being too obvious.

But the really great silver-gilt if not golden age of French violin-making dawned with Lupôt (1736-58), was extended by Pique (1788-1822), Vuillaume (1798-1875), Chanot (1801), Gand (1802), and Aldric (1792-1840), famous for his varnish; and Fent,[2] an admirable copyist, whose violins often sell as Lupôt's copies of Strad.

The labours of these great French disciples of Cremona, copyists and occasional forgers as they were, are sufficient to decide for ever the superiority of the Strad model over all others. Their lives were chiefly occupied in reproducing the unique Antonio minutely without attempting the least modification of the ultimate Cremona form, which he had defined.

The firm of Lupôt, immortalised by Nicolas Lupôt (1758-1824), dates back to 1696 or somewhat earlier. The father and grandfather of Nicolas Lupôt resided at different times at Plombiers, Luneville, and Orleans, but Nicolas was born at Stuttgart in 1758. He returned to Orleans in 1770.

Nicolas Lupôt was a man of great discernment, and not carried away with the fashion of the times. Although during the first twenty years of his life he must have seen and heard the German model of Stainer extolled, neither his own work nor yet his father's show any leaning towards it. His eye was enamoured with the Stradivari grand pattern, and his best violins are such loving and faithful copies of the great Antonio that many amateurs and some professional judges have been deceived by them. But Lupôt never got rid of the glassy, chippy French varnish, and although his warm orange tints are generous and the varnish has been laid on with a lavish hand, the rubbing bare by time of a Lupôt is very different from that fading away upon the fibres of a Strad, where always a subtler film protecting the wood seems to linger, a sort of mist of varnish to the end.

But Nicolas Lupôt was a great workman, and, as Hamlet modestly puts it, "indifferently honest" -- that is, honest as violin copyists go. He did not imitate, he _copied_, and varnished throughout; he never aged his copies prematurely, or tried to take in buyers; he reverenced his great Cremona model too much to palm off his own work as those of the master. Of course his violins have rubbed since and aged since, but they have aged and rubbed honestly, and are every year increasing in value, and distinctly mellowing in tone and sensitive quality. The moment Nicolas Lupôt arrived in Paris, early in this century, his talents were recognised; orders flowed in, and he remained and remains without a rival in the French school.