Violin, the 'Lady Blunt'

A violin made by Antonio Stradivari in Cremona in 1721, during the decade of his career now called the golden period, and one of a small number of his instruments to survive in something close to the condition it left his workshop in. It takes its name from Lady Anne Blunt, the daughter of Ada Lovelace and granddaughter of Lord Byron, who bought it from the dealer Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in 1864 and owned it for thirty years before selling it in 1895, more than two decades before her death in 1917.

After passing through a documented chain of dealers and collectors across the twentieth century, the violin was bought by the Nippon Music Foundation of Japan in 2008. In June 2011, nine days after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the Foundation sold it through Tarisio for GBP 9,808,000 (USD 15,894,000) including buyer's premium, against a hammer price of GBP 8,750,000, with every proceed pledged to disaster relief in northeastern Japan. It was, at the time, the highest price ever paid for a violin at auction.

The buyer has never been publicly identified, and the instrument has not been seen or loaned in public since the sale. Its condition, judged among the best-preserved of Stradivari's output by dealers who have examined it, and its charitable sale in the week after a national catastrophe, are the two facts that distinguish this violin from the roughly six hundred other surviving instruments bearing his label.

What it is

The 'Lady Blunt' is a violin made in Cremona in 1721 by Antonio Stradivari, then in his late seventies and at the height of what dealers and scholars call his golden period, the two decades either side of 1700 in which his instruments reached their fullest and most consistent form. It has a two-piece spruce top and a body of maple, finished in a rich red-brown varnish, and was constructed on Stradivari's 'P G' internal form, one of the larger patterns he used in his mature years. The maker's construction mark, the letters 'P G', is stamped inside the pegbox at the base of the mortise, and the printed paper label inside the body reads 'Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Faciebat Anno 1721'.

What sets this violin apart from the great majority of the roughly six hundred surviving instruments attributed to Stradivari is not its maker or its date but its condition. Dealers who have examined it describe the neck and fingerboard as substantially original, the edges and corners as unworn enough to show Stradivari's own tool marks, and the varnish as close to full strength across most of the surface. The instrument's original bass bar survives too, but not in use: Vuillaume fitted a modern replacement bass bar in the 1860s, the standard adaptation for modern string tension, and the original is retained separately with the violin rather than installed in it. An instrument played daily for three centuries does not look like this; one kept mostly by collectors, examined rather than performed on, does.

The condition, and who has said so

The claim that this is one of the best-preserved violins Stradivari ever made is not folklore repeated by later writers without checking; it has been made, on the record, by people whose business is examining these instruments for a living. When Tarisio announced the 2011 sale, its director Jason Price called the 'Lady Blunt' 'without doubt the best-preserved Stradivarius to come on the market in 40 years'. The same sale materials, drawing on the Hill firm's own condition notes going back to 1896, describe the edges, corners and channelling as showing the maker's tool marks unaltered by wear and the varnish as almost unworn, a description the Cozio Archive extends to the original neck and original fingerboard; the Cozio Archive also notes the original bass bar survives, accompanying the instrument, though the bass bar actually fitted since the 1860s is Vuillaume's modern replacement. None of this is typical after three hundred years of ownership.

The comparison consistently drawn is with the 1716 'Messiah', the Stradivari violin held by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and widely regarded as the single best-preserved instrument he made, in part because it was barely played and never sold commercially until it entered a museum collection. On 10 June 2011, ten days before the Tarisio sale, the 'Lady Blunt' and the 'Messiah' were displayed side by side at the Ashmolean, a rare direct comparison of the two instruments most often named together in this context. Coverage of the pairing at the time treated the 'Lady Blunt' as the closest surviving instrument to the 'Messiah's' condition, without claiming the two are identical or that either claim has been settled by an independent scientific ranking of preservation across the whole surviving corpus.

Vuillaume, and the violin's whereabouts before Lady Blunt

The documented history of this instrument begins with Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, the Paris-based dealer and maker who was the leading authority on old Italian instruments in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Vuillaume's own account, given in a letter at the time, is that the violin came to him out of Spain in the early 1860s in what he called an unheard-of condition, having apparently sat forgotten for over a century, its original Stradivari neck, fingerboard and bass bar still intact and the instrument unopened. Vuillaume compared its state to that of the 'Messiah', then already in his own possession. He carried out limited conservation work: he re-angled the neck at the heel to the longer, steeper standard that had become universal by the nineteenth century, a near-universal modification across surviving Stradivari violins and not evidence against originality elsewhere, and he fitted a new bass bar suited to modern string tension, keeping Stradivari's own bass bar separately with the instrument rather than restoring it to use. Vuillaume's own 1864 certificate records both changes in his own words: 'I have had to change the bar and lengthen the neck to modern dimensions, but I have preserved the original neck.'

Where in Spain the violin had been, and for how long, is not established in the sources reviewed for this record. The gap between its making in 1721 and its emergence in Vuillaume's hands around 1860 is close to a century and a half and is not documented.

Lady Anne Blunt

Anne Isabella Noel Blunt, later 15th Baroness Wentworth, was born in 1837, the only child of William King-Noel, 1st Earl of Lovelace, and Ada Lovelace, the mathematician remembered for her work with Charles Babbage. Her maternal grandparents were the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke, 11th Baroness Wentworth, after whom she was named. She was a trained violinist, having studied with, among others, Leopold Jansa, and it was on Jansa's recommendation that his pupil bought the violin now named for her from Vuillaume in 1864, when she was twenty-seven, for a price recorded in Vuillaume's own certificate as 260 pounds sterling.

She kept the instrument for over thirty years, into the 1890s, playing it by her own and others' later accounts, including at her Egyptian estate at Sheykh Obeyd near Cairo. In 1869 she married the poet and anti-imperialist campaigner Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, and together the couple founded the Crabbet Arabian Stud, importing bloodstock from the Arabian peninsula on journeys Anne herself undertook and later published accounts of; the great majority of Arabian horses registered in the United States today trace their pedigree to Crabbet stock. The marriage deteriorated over Wilfrid's repeated infidelities, and Anne formally separated from him in 1906, dividing the stud between them, a division her daughter's children spent years afterward in court over.

Lady Anne sold the violin in 1895, through the dealers Charles Withers and Emil Hamma to the Frankfurt dealer Charles F. Edler, more than two decades before her death in Cairo on 15 December 1917. No source consulted for this record connects the 1895 sale to any financial difficulty in the Blunt or Wentworth households; by the time real financial strain and the eventual break-up of the Crabbet stud arrived, in the years either side of 1913 to 1917, the instrument had already changed hands three times and belonged to collectors with no connection to the Blunts. Any account that places the sale of this violin at or after her 1917 death describes a different event, or is simply wrong; this record follows the documented 1895 sale date.

Hill and Sons, and the twentieth-century collectors

W.E. Hill and Sons, the London dealing firm that dominated the English trade in old Italian instruments for a century, bought the violin in 1896 and sold it immediately to Baron Johann Knoop, a Russian-German industrialist and one of the era's most acquisitive collectors, who at his peak owned around forty old instruments including some nineteen Stradivaris. Hill and Sons reacquired it around 1900 to 1901 and sold it to Johann Kruse, an Australian-born violinist who had trained under Joseph Joachim and played in the Joachim Quartet in the 1890s, making him, so far as the sources reviewed show, the only owner in this violin's history who was primarily a professional performer rather than a dealer or collector.

From Kruse the violin passed to Joseph Edward Street, an amateur player, by 1913, and then, again through Hill and Sons, to the collector Richard Bennett around 1915, who at various points owned more than twenty Stradivaris. Sources disagree on what happened next: the Cozio Archive's own Carteggio history describes Robert Augustus Bower only as the dealer who arranged Hill and Sons' 1941 sale to the Swiss dealer and maker Henry Werro, while other summaries of the Cozio Archive's property record place Bower as an intermediate owner for a period between Bennett and Werro. This record cannot resolve which is correct from the sources consulted, and gives Bower his own provisional entry in the provenance table below rather than asserting either version as settled. Henry Werro, eldest son of the maker Jean Werro, is documented as owning the violin by 1941; he kept it for nearly two decades and in 1943 published a short monograph on the instrument in an edition of only two hundred copies. Werro sold it in 1959 to the American collector Sam Bloomfield of California, who consigned it to Sotheby's in 1971, where it sold for the then world-record violin price of 84,500 pounds sterling, roughly 200,000 US dollars, to the Singapore-based collector Robin Loh, again through Hill and Sons. Loh lent the violin to the major 1987 Cremona exhibition marking the Stradivari tercentenary and kept it until 2000, when Hill and Sons brokered its sale to an undisclosed private collector.

The Nippon Music Foundation and the sale for Japan

The Nippon Music Foundation, a Japanese non-profit that acquires rare stringed instruments and lends them to leading performers rather than keeping them in vitrines, bought the violin in 2008 in a private transaction reported at the time as being worth more than ten million US dollars. On 11 March 2011 an earthquake and tsunami struck northeastern Japan, killing close to twenty thousand people and triggering the Fukushima nuclear accident. Nine days later, on 20 March 2011, the Foundation announced it would sell the 'Lady Blunt' and give every proceed to its Northeastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund; its president, Kazuko Shiomi, said at the time that the tragedy had shown that everyone needed to help in whatever way they could.

Tarisio, the New York and London auction house that specialises in stringed instruments and conducts its sales primarily online, handled the sale, which closed on 20 June 2011 after what contemporary reporting described as a ninety-minute contest between two bidders. The hammer price was 8,750,000 pounds sterling; with Tarisio's buyer's premium added, the total paid by the buyer was 9,808,000 pounds sterling, reported at the time as 15,894,000 US dollars. Sources consulted for this record are consistent in separating the two figures, and this record follows the same practice: the widely quoted 15.9 million dollar figure is the premium-inclusive total, not the hammer price. Tarisio's online sale format does not run through a traditional saleroom with a physical gavel, but it operates on the same hammer-plus-premium structure as a conventional auction house, and the distinction between the two figures is preserved in the contemporary trade reporting.

At over four times the previous auction record for a Stradivari violin, and reported at the time as the highest price ever paid for any violin sold at auction, the sale drew coverage well beyond the specialist violin trade, almost all of it built around the charitable purpose rather than the instrument's own history.

The buyer, and what is not known

The identity of the 2011 buyer has never been made public in any source consulted for this record. No subsequent sale, loan, public exhibition, insurance dispute, or recorded performance on the instrument has been traced since June 2011. This record states that plainly rather than guessing: the violin's whereabouts and use over the past decade and a half are undocumented in the public record, and any claim to the contrary should be checked against a source this record has not found.

Dendrochronology and technical examination

The dendrochronologist John C. Topham examined the spruce top and dated its youngest surviving growth ring to 1704, a result consistent with the 1721 date on the label and with normal practice of seasoning wood for some years before use; it does not itself prove the instrument's construction date, only that the wood could not have been felled before 1704. No published technical imaging, CT scan, or open dendrochronological dataset for this specific violin was located in the sources consulted, in contrast to some other named Stradivaris that have been the subject of dedicated scientific studies; a student or researcher wanting the underlying tree-ring data or high-resolution surface imaging would need to approach Tarisio's Cozio Archive or the instrument's current owner directly, and there is no indication either is publicly available.

What the money has meant, across three centuries of sales

The prices recorded for this single violin trace the growth of the market for old Italian instruments about as clearly as any object could. Vuillaume sold it to Lady Anne Blunt in 1864 for 260 pounds sterling. It sold at Sotheby's in 1971 for 84,500 pounds, already a world record for a violin at auction and roughly three hundred times the 1864 price without adjusting for inflation. The Nippon Music Foundation paid over ten million dollars privately in 2008. In 2011 it sold for close to sixteen million dollars including premium, itself more than four times the previous Stradivari auction record and, at the time, the highest price paid for any violin sold at auction. No single one of these figures converts cleanly to a present-day equivalent without specifying a method and a date, and this record does not attempt one; what is clear without any conversion is that each sale reset what the trade considered the ceiling for an old Italian violin, and that the ceiling has moved a very long way in a century and a half.