Scan 65
The Violin Gallery: Comprising: Section I. South Kensington Special …, 1890
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1of the "violon du diable," and be worth £350. But collect twenty amateurs all ready to buy it, and, instead of cracking it, dip it into a jar of spirits and wash the varnish off. Not one of those customers will give you above £40 for it; nor would it in reality be worth quite so much in the market. Take another example. There is a beautiful and very perfect violin by Stradiuarius, which the Times, in an article on these instruments, calls La Messie. These leading journals have private information on every subject, even grammar. I prefer to call it—after the very intelligent man to whom we owe the sight of it—the Vuillaume Stradiuarius. Well, the Vuillaume Stradiuarius is worth, as the times go, £600 at least. Wash off the varnish, it would be worth £35; because, unlike No. 94, it has one little crack. As a further illustration that violins are heard by the eye, let me remind your readers of the high prices at which numberless copies of the old makers were sold in Paris for many years. The inventors of this art undertook to deliver a new violin, that in usage and colour of the worn parts should be exactly like an old and worn violin of some favourite maker. Now, to do this with white wood was impossible; so the wood was baked in the oven or coloured yellow with the smoke of sulphuric acid, or so forth, to give it the colour of age; but these processes kill the wood as a vehicle of sound; and these copies were, and are, the worst musical instruments Europe has created in this century; and, bad as they are at starting, they get worse every year of their untuneful existence; yet because they flattered the eye with something like the light and shade and picturesqueness of the Cremona violin, these pseudo-antiques, though illimitable in number, sold like wildfire; and hundreds of self-deceivers heard them by the eye, and fancied these tin-pots sounded divinely. The hideous red violins of Bernardel, Gand, and an English maker or two, are a reaction against these copies; they are made honestly with white wood, and they will, at all events, improve in sound every year and every decade. It comes to this, then, that the varnish of Cremona, as operated on by time and usage, has an imitable beauty, and we pay a high price for it in second-class makers, and an enormous price in a fine Stradiuarius or Joseph Guarnerius. No wonder, then, that many violin-makers have tried hard to discover the secret of this varnish; many chemists have given days and nights of anxious study to it. More than once, even in my time, hopes have run high, but only to fall again. Some have even cried Eureka! to the public; but the moment others looked at their discovery and compared it with the real thing, "inextinguishable laughter shook the skies." At last despair has succeeded to all that energetic study, and the varnish of Cremona is sullenly given up as a lost art.
3I have heard and read a great deal about it, and I think I can state the principal theories briefly, but intelligibly.
51. It used to be stoutly maintained that the basis was amber; that these old Italians had the art of infusing amber without impairing its transparency: once fused, by dry heat, it could be boiled into a varnish with oil and spirit of turpentine, and combined with transparent yet lasting colours. To convince me, they used to rub the worn part of a Cremona with their sleeves, and then
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