Voller Brothers, London, c.1900

Description

An English violin by the brothers William, Charles & Alfred Voller, London, circa 1900.
Labelled: Fragments of an illegible label are visible.

The Voller brothers are famed equally for their legitimate copies of celebrated old instruments and for their devious forays into fakery, producing some of the most coveted of all instruments made by English makers. Their steady commitment to working as a family team mean that their work was invariably the culmination of several minds and many different approaches, nevertheless there are firm indicators of their workshop style and practice that can be detected, especially in an instrument that is well preserved.

It appears that part of their technique was to work up to a forgery by producing several instruments simultaneously, rather like an artist’s preparatory works. At each level the most successful attempt would go forwards and others would be put aside until finally only one completed masterpiece would be left on the table. The others would be adapted, and turned into pastiches along the way, often lacking the compelling finesse to be found in their best work (we have seen a superb example, the twin to the “Balfour Strad” manipulated into a clever Guadagnini fake). This violin is a good example of this practice, set aside in the early stages of the process. It owes its model to a Stradivari violin of the Golden period, but has been reworked and clean-varnished in order to resemble the kind of contemporaneous Italian instruments that were fetching high prices through English importers at the time – it is not a copy of anything, but it fits in the same space as Enrico Rocca or Giuseppe Pedrazzini, both of whom were being promoted on the London market by Hawkes & Co.

As a result of its simplicity it is an important example of the Vollers work, cataloguing many of the basic techniques that they used without the distractions of antiquing or an eccentric model. It is the subject of an article on my research blog, Voller – plain and simple.

Certificate: Our certificate available upon purchase.

Condition notes: The violin is in an excellent state of preservation. Length of back 354mm.