Scan 67
The Violin Gallery: Comprising: Section I. South Kensington Special …, 1890
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1viz., his dark red varnish, the key to all the varnish of Cremona, red or yellow. (N. B.—The yellow always beat me dead, till I got to it by this detour.) There is no specimen in the collection of this red varnish so violent as I have seen; but Mr. Pawle's bass, No. 187, will do. Please walk with me up to the back of that bass, and let us disregard all hypotheses and theories, and use our eyes. What do we see before us? A bass with a red varnish that chips very readily off what people call the bare wood. But never mind what these echoes of echoes call it. What is it? It is not bare wood. Bare wood turns a dirty brown with age. This is a rich and lovely yellow. By its colour and its glassy gloss, and by disbelieving what echoes say and trusting only to our eyes, we may see at a glance it is not bare wood, but highly varnished wood. This varnish is evidently oil, and contains a gum. Allowing for the tendency of oil to run into the wood, I should say four coats of oil varnish: and this they call the bare wood. We have now discovered the first process: a clear oil varnish laid on the white wood with some transparent gum not high coloured. Now proceed a step further; the red and chippy varnish, what is that? "Oh that is a varnish of the same quality but another colour," say the theorists No. 4. "How do you know?" say I. "It is self-evident. Would a man begin with oil varnish and then go into spirit varnish?" is their reply. Now observe, this is not humble observation, it is only rational preconception. But if discovery has an enemy in the human mind, that enemy is preconception. Let us then trust only to humble observation. Here is a clear varnish without the ghost of a chip in its nature; and upon it is a red varnish that is all chip. Does that look as if the two varnishes were homogeneous? Is chip precisely the same thing as no chip? If homogeneous, there would be chemical affinity between the two. But this extreme readiness of the red varnish to chip away from the clear marks a defect of chemical affinity between the two. Why, if you were to put your thumbnail against that red varnish, a little piece would come away directly. This is not so in any known case of oil upon oil. Take old Forster, for instance, he begins with clear oil varnish; then on that he puts a distinct oil varnish with the colour and transparency of pea-soup. You will not get his pea-soup to chip off his clear varnish in a hurry. There is a bass by William Forster in the collection a hundred years old; but the wear is confined to the places where the top varnish must go in a played bass. Everywhere else his pea-soup sticks tight to his clear varnish, being oil upon oil. Now, take a perfectly distinct line of observation. In varnishes oil is a diluent of colour. It is not in the power of man to charge an oil varnish with colour so highly as the top varnish of Mr. Pawle's bass is charged. And it must be remembered that the clear varnish below has filled all the pores of the wood; therefore the diluent cannot escape into the wood, and so leave the colour undiluted; if that red varnish was ever oil varnish, every particle of the oil must be there still. What, in that mere film so crammed with colour? Never! Nor yet in the top varnish of the Spanish bass, which is thinner still, yet more charged with colour than any topaz of twice the thickness. This, then, is how Antonius Stradiuarius varnished
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