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Scan 254
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 240. See the scan on archive.org.
1that he knows bows by this maker which will bear comparison with any ever made. He marked his own work "F. N. Voirin." Nicolas Maire, born in Mirecourt, was a pupil of Jacques Lafleur, and six years ago was alive in Paris and still producing bows which do not, however, call for more particular notice. The firm of Gand, already referred to, also made good bows, and there was a maker in Strasburg named Schwartz, whose work has attained some celebrity.
3But the maker who, after Tourte, most decidedly influenced the art of bow making in France, was, undoubtedly, J. B. Vuillaume, who brought to bear in this department of his industry the same spirit of scientific inquiry which had procured for him such excellent results in the major branch. The accuracy with which the dimensions of Tourte's bows are calculated, and their unvarying character, would naturally lead one to suppose that the man who produced them had some rigorous scientific rule by means of which he guided himself to the achievement of these results. But François Tourte was, in the ordinary sense of the word, a wholly uneducated and illiterate man. He had no other training but that of a watchmaker, and was unable either to read or write. He nevertheless fabricated these bows, and Vuillaume, determined if possible to discover the secret, made a great number of measurements of the various bows which passed through his hands, the final result of his observations being given by him to M. Fetis, who embodied it in his work on Stradivari, a translation of which is published by Messrs. Cocks and Co. Vuillaume found that the diameters of Tourte's sticks diminish with
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