Bronze statuette of Antonio Stradivari, London, 1894.
The brothers William, Alfred and Charles Voller were all capable artists beyond their work as violin makers, and we have watercolour paintings in our archives by each of the three brothers, however William was the most capable artist. A number of still-life paintings, invariably of violin-related subjects survive by him, and as a sculptor he produced a portrait bust in bronze of the cellist Alfredo Piatti and another of Stradivari based on the French 1868 Edouard Hamman engraving. Over the years this has become the iconic image of Stradivari, appearing in the 1937 Stradivari Centenary Exhibition and latterly in an iconic life-size sculpture sitting on a bench in the middle of Cremona. We were delighted to make this available to the Museo del Violino in Cremona for their exhibition on the iconography of Antonio Stradivari, where it is on temporary display along with the famous Edgar Bundy paintings imagining his workshop, and the eighteenth century caricatures that appear to be of Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri
Connoissership at Oxford University.
For the academic world there are deep problems that arise from historic artefacts that are untethered from a record of provenance, and the violin is
