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…

A tenor viola, Absam, 1660. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has three Stradivari violins, good cellos but hitherto no violas of any note to form a string quartet for performance within the museum setting. By finding a suitable viola to fill their requirement it has transformed the musical potential of their playing collection. Jacob Stainer…

The Bowes Museum In 2023 the Bowes Museum held a landmark exhibition centred around their most iconic object, the life-sized automaton silver swan made by the “ingenious mechanick” John Joseph Merlin. His inventiveness was legendary in the late eighteenth-century, and directly inspired Charles Babbage’s invention of the ‘difference engine’ celebrated as the first computer. Amongst…

In 2009 I was asked to travel to Toronto to inspect a small collection of musical instruments owned by the university and displayed in a glass case over a fireplace in a bar. For years I had heard rumours about these instruments and suggestions that there might be more to them than meets the eye.…