Violoncello, the 'Marylebone'

A working cello of 1688 by Antonio Stradivari that spent more than two centuries in the ordinary trade of English and European violin dealing before becoming, in 1985, the fourth piece of a matched set assembled for the collector Herbert R. Axelrod. Unlike its three companions, this cello was never decorated by Stradivari himself: the ornament on its ribs and pegbox is a twentieth-century transfer copying a genuinely decorated Stradivari cello in the Spanish royal collection, added so the instrument would visually complete a 'quartet of decorated instruments.' The cellist Anner Bylsma called it, accurately, the tattooed cello.

The Axelrods gave the completed quartet to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where it was valued at 50 million dollars, a figure the U.S. Senate Finance Committee later moved to question alongside a separate, unrelated federal tax fraud case against the donor. The cello itself carries no accusation of fakery or theft; the dispute that touched it was about what the whole gift was declared to be worth, not about what the instrument is.

It is now part of the Smithsonian's working collection of historical instruments, played on occasion by the museum's own curator-cellist, and is currently off public view.

What the instrument is

The Marylebone is a full-size cello built by Antonio Stradivari in Cremona in 1688: a multi-piece spruce top, a two-piece plain maple back to which narrow wings have been added at the corners, ribs and scroll of matching plain maple, and a spirit varnish of orange-brown over a golden ground. The Smithsonian's own measurements give it as 121.92 by 43.5 by 24.77 centimetres overall, excluding the tailpin. In the measurement violin-trade catalogues actually use for comparing cellos, the back length, the Cozio Archive gives 73 centimetres, with upper, middle and lower bouts of 34.9, 22.9 and 43.5 centimetres.

It is not, physically, the instrument Stradivari built. Like a large number of seventeenth-century Cremonese cellos, it was reduced in size by a later maker to bring it closer to the proportions cellists and cello cases could actually use. A written opinion from Alfred E. Hill, on the 1928 certificate issued by W. E. Hill & Sons, records that the cello was originally of larger proportions and had been reduced in size, probably by the London maker and dealer John Betts, with the varnish somewhat retouched in the process; Hill considered the scroll, untouched by the reduction, to be particularly fine and quite pure. The instrument still carries its original Stradivari label.

A long-pattern cello and why it was cut down

In 1688 Stradivari had not yet settled on the cello proportions the instrument is built to today. His larger, earlier cello outlines, sometimes called the long pattern, produced instruments close to 79 or 80 centimetres in back length, cumbersome for players and for makers copying them alike. Around 1707 Stradivari redesigned the cello on a smaller outline, the so-called forma B, at roughly 75.5 centimetres, and that later pattern became the template most subsequent cello makers actually used.

A large-pattern Stradivari cello built twenty years before that redesign was, by the standard eighteenth and nineteenth-century measure of a cello's usefulness, oversized. Cutting such an instrument down to a workable modern length, as happened here, was routine trade practice in London and Paris workshops of the period, not a mark of disrespect for the maker: Betts's own shop is recorded as having handled at least a dozen fine Stradivari cellos across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several of which supplied English makers such as Lockey Hill and the Fendt family with working templates for their own instruments. The Marylebone, on the Cozio Archive's account, is very probably the source Lockey Hill used for one such set of templates, taken from a large Stradivari then in the Betts shop.

The decoration, and why it is not Stradivari's

Only a small number of Stradivari's own instruments carry decoration applied at the time of manufacture, roughly eleven surviving examples out of the more than one thousand instruments the Hill firm calculated he made. Among the genuine examples are the 1679 Hellier violin, inlaid with ivory and, by one account, hundreds of small gems, and a complete matched quartet made for the Spanish court, now in the Royal Palace in Madrid, whose 1696 cello is the only decorated cello Stradivari is known to have built himself.

The Marylebone was not one of these. When Herbert Axelrod assembled his own quartet in the 1980s, he already owned two decorated Stradivari violins and a decorated viola, but the cello he needed to complete the set carried no ornament at all. According to the Cozio Archive, Axelrod had the design of the Madrid cello's decoration made into a transfer and applied to the ribs and pegbox of the Marylebone, so that the four instruments of his own quartet would present as a visually matched decorated set. The Dutch cellist Anner Bylsma, who is on record elsewhere performing on a different Smithsonian Stradivari cello, the Servais, called the Marylebone the tattooed cello, a name that is exact rather than affectionate: the ornament sits on the surface of the wood, copying a pattern that belongs to a different instrument in a different country, and it dates from the twentieth century, not the seventeenth. Nothing in the sources consulted suggests the transfer was ever presented to the Smithsonian, or by the Smithsonian to the public, as Stradivari's own work; the museum's own object record describes it plainly as twentieth-century applied decoration.

Two names from the London trade: Cazenove and Payne

The cello's working name compounds two later owners rather than describing anything about its manufacture. James Cazenove, a member of a prominent family of financiers, owned it from 1821; a Mr. Payne of Marylebone, in London, held it later in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, until 1911. Payne is recorded as a somewhat eccentric collector who owned instruments of very mixed quality alongside genuine fine pieces. Neither man is otherwise notable in violin history; the name survives simply because it was the name attached to the instrument when it passed through the hands that later catalogued it.

The documented chain before Axelrod

Independently of the other three instruments in the Axelrod group, the Cozio Archive records a specific ownership chain for this cello, and it does not run through the same hands as the companion Ole Bull violin's published history. As far as the sources consulted allow it to be reconstructed: Heinrich Glatz owned the cello until 1821; James Cazenove from 1821; Alexander Rivaz from 1880; Payne of Marylebone until 1911; W. E. Hill & Sons from 1911; the Stuttgart dealers Hamma and Co. for a period before Hill and Sons reacquired it in 1928 and issued Alfred E. Hill's certificate; the Rudolph Wurlitzer Co. of New York from 1933; and Dr. Gustav Pistor from 1937.

Two further details appear in the same archive record without a clear place in this sequence: a mention of the dealer Harford and of a transaction involving Rudolph Wurlitzer Co. connected to the year 1929, and a reference to John Betts himself as a name in the ownership list rather than only as the probable hand behind the reduction. Given that Betts's own working life closed with his death in 1823, before Glatz's recorded ownership even ends, these entries most likely belong earlier in the story, around the reduction itself, than their position in the source suggests; this record does not guess at the correct placement and flags it as unresolved rather than silently reordering it.

Between Gustav Pistor's ownership from 1937 and Herbert Axelrod's acquisition in 1985, no owner or transaction is documented in any source consulted for this record. That gap of roughly five decades, spanning the Second World War and its aftermath in Europe, is real and is recorded as a gap, not bridged with an assumption.

Axelrod's quartet and the Smithsonian gift

Herbert Axelrod, a New Jersey publisher of pet-fishkeeping books who had built a fortune from Tropical Fish Hobbyist magazine and TFH Publications, bought his first Stradivarius violin in 1975 and went on to assemble a substantial collection of fine stringed instruments. He acquired the Marylebone cello in 1985, the same year the New York dealer Jacques Francais published a short illustrated book, The Dr. Herbert Axelrod Stradivari Quartet, describing all four instruments Axelrod had by then brought together; the sources consulted do not specify whether Francais personally brokered the cello's sale to Axelrod, only that his book documents the completed set that year.

The instruments had already been on loan to the National Museum of American History through the 1980s when, in late 1997, Axelrod converted the loan into an outright gift. Contemporary reporting in Smithsonian magazine, published in August 1998, describes the donation as recent and credits Gary Sturm, an assistant chairman in the museum's Division of Cultural History, with having done the work that won Axelrod's trust. The instruments and a one million dollar endowment for the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society were valued at the time at fifty million dollars, and the Smithsonian named Axelrod its 1999 Donor of the Year. The Smithsonian's own accession number for the group, 2000.0013, carries a year prefix consistent with the institution's formal registration of the gift being completed in 2000, two to three years after the donation was announced and the objects were already in the building; both dates are documented and this record gives both rather than picking one.

The valuation, and the Senate inquiry

The fifty million dollar figure did not hold up to later scrutiny. In May 2004 the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Senator Charles Grassley, wrote to the Smithsonian seeking every record connected to the 1998 donation, including the donor's IRS Form 8283, the form used to substantiate a non-cash charitable deduction, as part of a wider inquiry into whether wealthy donors were routinely inflating appraisals of art, land and instruments to claim larger deductions than the gifts were worth. Independent estimates of the Axelrod quartet's value that surfaced during the same period ran as low as fifteen to twenty-six million dollars, well under half the figure used at the time of the gift.

This inquiry is genuinely about the same 1998 donation that includes the Marylebone cello, and it belongs in this record for that reason. It is not, however, an accusation that the cello itself is not what it is claimed to be, or that its Stradivari attribution or ownership history was fabricated; the concern raised was about the dollar figure attached to the gift as a whole for tax purposes, not about the authenticity of any one instrument in it. No source consulted for this record states what, if anything, the Senate inquiry concluded about this specific donation.

Axelrod's later legal trouble, kept separate

Axelrod's name recurs in a second, unconnected legal matter several years later. In April 2004 he was indicted in federal court in New Jersey, accused of moving money into Swiss bank accounts over roughly twenty years without declaring it. He did not appear for his arraignment and was found to have flown to Cuba; he was arrested by German authorities at Berlin's Tegel airport in June 2004 as he arrived on a flight from Zurich, and was extradited to the United States. He pleaded guilty to helping an employee file a false tax return and, on 21 March 2005, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison, of which he served sixteen. He died in Zurich on 15 May 2017, aged eighty-nine.

Nothing in the sources consulted ties this tax case to the Smithsonian donation, the cello's attribution, or its ownership history; it is recorded here, dated and sourced, as a fact about the donor's own later life, not as a shadow over the object.

Life in the museum

The Axelrod quartet, together with the museum's separate Servais Stradivarius cello, a different and unrelated instrument of 1701 also in the Smithsonian's collection, was on public display at the National Museum of American History from 1964 until 2012; no source consulted explains why it came off view that year. The Smithsonian Chamber Music Society, whose resident ensemble was renamed the Axelrod String Quartet on the strength of the gift, continues to give concerts using instruments from the Axelrod, Amati and Vuillaume groups the Axelrods donated, with the museum's own curator of musical instruments, the cellist Kenneth Slowik, playing the cello parts. Slowik is separately reported to have performed a Bach suite on the Marylebone cello itself at a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification, held at the Italian ambassador's residence in Washington. The instrument is not, as of this record, on public display, but it remains part of a working collection rather than a sealed one.

What is still unresolved

Two separate gaps sit inside this history and neither should be smoothed over. The first is documentary: the exact sequence of ownership between John Betts's probable reduction of the cello, before or around 1821, and the start of the clearly dated Glatz-to-Cazenove chain, and the entirely undocumented five decades between Gustav Pistor's ownership from 1937 and Axelrod's acquisition in 1985. The second is a question of framing: this cello is marketed and displayed as one quarter of a matched set of decorated Stradivari instruments, when three of the four were decorated by Stradivari and this one was not, a distinction the museum's own catalogue record preserves but that popular description of the group routinely erases.