Books › Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883 › scan 179
Scan 179
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
2 lines. Read by computer on 30 September 2026. Printed page 165. See the scan on archive.org.
1to require some explanation. But, even in those days, no one would dream of obtaining a Stradivari for such a sum, and it is to be understood, although it is not so stated, that Vuillaume did not sell these instruments as veritable Italian violins, but as copies. He found it necessary to live by making imitations of the old, or die in constructing new ones. Finding success in this manner of work so pronounced, he, about the same time, and after seeing a bass viol by Duiffoprugcar, commenced constructing those violins and violoncellos which are to this day reckoned by some to be the actual productions of that ancient maker. Whether he sold those instruments "standing upon one foot," as the phrase goes, or whether the fraud was invented by their subsequent possessors, I cannot ascertain, for any allusion to the possibility of a misapprehension of this circumstance seems to be carefully avoided; but that he could, and did, make them is certain, not only from his own affirmation, but from the testimony of Paganini, before referred to, and from many other sources. A great number of splendid Italian instruments passed through his hands, and he set himself with true scientific enthusiasm to discover the causes of their excellence, and succeeded to an unprecedented degree. Besides his labour and study at home, he travelled through Switzerland, the Tyrol, Italy, and elsewhere, buying maple and old pine with the bark on, old furniture, old flooring, &c., and made them up into violins and violoncellos, experimenting in various ways, until he came to the conclusion that new wood, dried in pieces of from 1 in. to \( \frac{1}{2} \) in. thick for a period of about ten years,
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