Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 110
Scan 110
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
8 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1VIOLINS IN FRANCE
3at different times at Plombiers, Luneville, and Orleans, but Nicolas was born at Stuttgart in 1758. He returned to Orleans in 1770.
5Nicolas 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.
7But 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
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