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Scan 174
The Hawley Collection of violins, 1904
12 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 100. See the scan on archive.org.
1THE HAWLEY COLLECTION OF VIOLINS
3No bow-maker, to the present day, has been able to discover the process. They have the form, but that divine something which gives power and beauty of tone as drawn by a Tourte is lacking. Compared with a Tourte, other bows are like the body without the soul. Tourte's success was undoubtedly due to three things:
51. His ability to select the proper pernambuco;
62. His skill in fashioning the stick and mounting it, so that perfect balance was maintained, and strength evenly distributed, thus rendering its tone-producing power the same at point, middle, or heel, and responsive to every impulse of the player;
73. His wonderful strength of nerve and wrist and trueness of eye, which gave him the physical ability to execute without effort the finest feats of workmanship.
9Tourte never allowed a defective stick to leave his atelier. He is said to have destroyed every one which was not up to the required standard. The popular idea that stiffness is the chief factor in a bow is a mistake. Stiffness is not necessarily strength. Without elasticity and pliability, fine results cannot be obtained. The beautiful cannot be forced out of a Cremona by main strength, but it can be coaxed by an elastic bow, manipulated by an elastic wrist. Tourte never stamped his bows with his name, a point to be remembered. The prices Tourte obtained for his best bows, from $60 to $75, were greater than those of any maker since his time. Considering the value of money then as compared with the present, his prices seem to the average player fabulous. In fact, comparatively speaking, his bows were higher then than now. This strange condition was due to the fact that he was the only bow-maker to whom a player could turn, until his pupils and imitators began to turn out good bows on the same lines, after which prices fell. Their success has always depended upon their ability to copy Tourte's work. His bows are in ebony trimmed with silver, or tortoise shell trimmed with gold. The original frog has no metallic slide. These were introduced by François Lupot, who fitted many of Tourte's bows with the device. The ferrule that spreads the hair is, as a rule, narrow; the original screw is short and blunt, and he invariably secured the button by a rivet, the silver ends of which may be seen if carefully examined. The heads of Tourte's bows are indicative in an artistic way of the character of man as a worker, for they are studies in strength, elegance, and beauty. They vary somewhat in design, the chief ones being the hatchet shaped head of the octagonal bow and the oval head of the round sticks. The slot in the stick, in which the frog slides, is short, with a peculiar dip at the four corners, and it is set farther back than in the case of other makers, so that the frog is usually nearer the end of the stick. He always employed a certain kind of mother-of-pearl for his bow slides and the ornamentation of the frog. These vary in the cutting according to the period in which they were made. The value of Tourte's bows to-day varies in accordance with the quality and the preservation of the stick, the average being from $200 to $350, although in Paris, 2,500 francs is not an uncommon price. Tourte usually stained his bows a chocolate color, but others are deeper, and again some are quite light in shade.
11Like many of the great violin-makers of Cremona, Tourte worked nearly to the time of his death. The end came in April, 1835, in his eighty-eighth year. He was
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