Books › The Belle Skinner collection of old musical instruments, Holyoke, Massachusetts, 1933 › scan 147
Scan 147
The Belle Skinner collection of old musical instruments, Holyoke, Massachusetts, 1933
20 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. Printed page 129. See the scan on archive.org.
A town on its own line is one of the directory's headings. That is where the town on a maker's page comes from.
1No. 55
3VIOLA D’AMORE
5JOHANN GEORG HELLMER
6PRAGUE
8BOHEMIAN 174-
10The famous Hellmer of Prague is the maker of this viola. The body is of fine curly maple. The carved peg-box holds fourteen rosewood tuning-peggs tipped with ivory, seven for the sympathetic strings, and terminates in a gracefully carved head of a woman. The belly is edged with a dark strip of wood and a single line of purfling inside it. The sound-holes are of the old “flaming-sword” pattern. A dark, reddish-brown varnish covers this fine instrument which bears the maker’s name on a label, slightly torn, pasted within:
12Joannes Georgius Hellm . . .
13Pragensis me fecit 174 . . .
15This instrument came from the Morris Steinert Collection. Lütgendorff (II, pp. 208-209) lists Johann Georg Hellmer (1687-1770) as an instrument maker of Prague, and states that Beethoven owned a violin made by Hellmer of the year 1737. Hellmer used a red-brown oil varnish. A theorbo repaired by him in 1755 is in the Collection of Old Music Instruments in Vienna, and instruments of his are said to be in Prague and various other Bohemian cities.
17In Van der Straeten’s book on the violoncello (I, p. 23) we read that about 1600 the acoustic principle of sympathetic or vibrating strings was investigated by English scientists (see Bacon’s Natural History, 1620) with the result that Farrant, a musician in King Charles I’s band, applied them to the viol.
19Extreme length, 2 ft. 7 in.; length of body, 1 ft. 3 in.; width, 9½ in.; width of sides, 2¼ in.; depth, 3¼ in.
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.