The business papers of Henry and Henry William Hill. We recently uncovered and acquired on behalf of a client the enormous and extensive collected papers of Henry and Henry William Hill. The father and son both played a detached role from the family enterprise of W.E. Hill & Son (William Ebsworth Hill was the brother of Henry), focussing on their musical life and serving as an intermediary between musicians and the violin dealing firm. The papers are providing a vast

Citole, East Anglian, 1280-1330 period. The British Museum citole is represented as the finest example of English medieval decorative woodworking. I was privileged to take part in studies on the instrument, focussing on my expertise in sixteenth-century violin making and its relationship to the belly of the instrument that was added in 1578. With the help of other instruments it was possible to firmly attribute the conversion to a violin to the Bassano brothers who came from Venice to London

Portrait by the Master of the Countess of Warwick, 1550s. I was asked to examine the musical elements of an English family group portrait painted by the anonymous Master of the Countess of Warwick on behalf of the Weiss Gallery in London. Work with my musicological colleague Kerry McCarthy began with the expectation that the partbooks held in the hands of the children would yield an English motet, perhaps by Thomas Tallis or William Byrd, with the hope that there

Violin by the Bassano Brothers, London c.1575. I was asked to examine a primitive violin catalogued in the Edinburgh University Collection of Historical Musical Instruments as a nineteenth-century mute violin on the possibility it may be from a century earlier, but the object had long been of interest to me, and the opportunity to handle it confirmed that it was probably from the sixteenth century, and that the insect markings on the corners were anatomically specific to the silk moth,

Self portrait, Madrid, period 1564-1572 During her lifetime, the Cremonese Sofonisba Anguissola was arguably the third famous artist of the Italian Renaissance after Titian and Michelangelo, and the first female painter to gain significant patronage and recognition Her importance to the violin world, whilst tangential, is of great significance. As a Cremonese contemporary of Andrea Amati, she was the pupil of Bernardino Campi, members of whose family decorated the Amati violins for the court of Charles IX of France. At

Violin by Andrea Amati, Cremona c.1575. Andrea Amati is the father of Cremonese violin making with fewer than two dozen known examples of his work extant, but the presence of most of his surviving works on public display in museum collections gives the impression of a much larger body of surviving work. When an example of his work came for sale we were able to provide third-party advice and expertise to support the cultural significance and rarity of the instrument

Portrait of Nicholas Lanier, London, 1613. Heralded by Sir Roy Strong as the most important discovery in early English portraiture in a century, it was my privilege to examine the painting before and during conservation after its acquisition by the Weiss Gallery in London. The painting became the subject of a scholarly monograph Nicholas Lanier: A Portrait Revealed in which I was invited to write chapters on the musical symbolism within the painting. Nicholas Lanier was a musician appointed the first Master

English cittern, Southwark, circa 1620. The cittern was a mainstay of domestic music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but remarkably few examples survive. Surprisingly it was the English, rather than the Italians that made the best use of the instrument with highly virtuosic repertoire emerging out of the Elizabethan era. As early as 1618 Michael Praetorius identified the klein Englische zitterlein as synonymous with this style of playing and the example illustrated conforms precisely to the dimensions of the

Consultation services for a public instrument collection. We provided valuations, and curatorial services for the donation of a musical instrument collection to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, gifted as part of a philanthropic benefaction to the conservatoire that included the funding of the Koerner concert hall. The collection is on display in the public areas around the hall, and we were able to provide conservation advice that would enable the future care and preservation of the collection..