Differences in Appearance of Different Violin Makers

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m David Kaynor for expertvillage.com. Here we have three violins and as I point to them, this violin is from a German factory in the 1920’s, the Heberlein Factory and this is quite beautifully figured maple. This violin is an older German violin, I don’t know its age but it has an on the inside of the top when I had it apart I found penciled handwriting saying that it been repaired in New York in 1911, so it’s definitely someone older and it’s similar maple figure. And the neck on this instrument has I think a more pronounced figure in the grain. And then the other violin is my French violin, and here the figure is more settled, it’s still visible than it is more settled and violin makers developed different sort of signature styles of altering the color of the varnish and in some cases they did it to an extreme. This is referred to in the commercial violin trade as imitation old, and it was thought I believe that an older violin would have better tone would have also withstood the test of time, and therefore you can increase the value of a new violin if you made it look old. Now whether that really made any difference in the value of the violins I’m not prepared to say, but the result is that violins have very interesting appearances that I think arise from the ways that individual violin makers tried to apply that concept. So a lot of the violins don’t have uniform coloring in uniform varnish, but actually deliberate changes in the varnish, the differences in the varnish that are related to making it look older and more in use."