Books › The fiddle fancier's guide; a manual of information regarding violins, violas, basses and bows of classical and modern times, together with biographical notices and portraits of the most famous performers of these instruments, 1892 › scan 140
Scan 140
The fiddle fancier's guide; a manual of information regarding violins, violas, basses and bows of classical and modern times, together with biographical notices and portraits of the most famous performers of these instruments, 1892
2 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. Printed page 126. See the scan on archive.org.
1of the Brussels Conservatoire, was compiling his monograph on Antonio Stradivari, mainly from material supplied to him by Vuillaume, we find incorporated in this work a statement that there was a Jean Vuillaume, who had been employed in the establishment of Stradivari, and who had made good violins from about 1700 to 1740. The only known specimen of a violin by this maker appears to have been one which was in the possession of J. B. Vuillaume, and which was seen by M. Vidal, who describes it as a very common piece of work, with painted purfling, narrow edges, and yellow varnish, and in which no connoisseur could find the slightest trace of the magnificent example and tuition of Stradivari. When the researches as above referred to were made, no trace of relationship between the two families could be found. It is not even said that this Jean Vuillaume had been discovered to be a real personage. However that may be, the most remote ancestor of the family then reported was Vuillaume's own father, Claude, who is called a violin maker, and the prentice master of his four sons, Jean Baptiste, Nicolas, Nicolas-François, and Claude François. It does not appear that the information supplied in this way to M. Vidal was verified by him when he published it in the year following Vuillaume's death, namely, in 1876, and I am beginning to fancy that J. B. Vuillaume, however clever he was as a violin maker and dealer, was a practical joker of a somewhat serious turn of mind, or else that those to whom he conveyed such details had failed to comprehend their precise significance. At all events, the biographical account of the family which is at present current from
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