Behind the scenes as the Lady Blunt fetched £9.8m

The Lady Blunt Stradivari: sold for £9.8m

The build-up had been tangibly tense, but last night, at 8.15pm, the Lady Blunt Stradivari violin (apart from the Ashmolean Museum’s “Messie”, the most perfectly-preserved Strad in existence) was sold for £9.8m in an on-line sale, to raise money for the disaster relief fund in Japan.

$15.9m is well over four times the current record for an instrument at auction, and there was a real worry in the run-up that the open market might not be able to support such a piece, and that there may have been no sale at all. 

To share in the final moments of drama, the great and good of the violin world were invited to a small private reception, running over the final two hours of bidding. It felt like an intimate gathering (although perhaps, in violin terms, a bit like the moment Prince William mouthed to Kate Middleton’s father at the top of the aisle in Westminster Abbey: “Just a quiet family affair”), with the characters to be found in the violin world all suited and brushed, looking as well-presented as such a momentous occasion required.

There is a considerable amount of secrecy that goes on in the violin business. It’s never completely clear exactly how much some instruments that are sold privately actually go for: millionaires, of course, rarely want other people to know how they spend their money. There is an enormous scope for flannel that has only increased over the years as fewer instruments of great importance make it to the auction rostrum. In the 1980s, one legendary head of an auction department had a heated discussion with his specialists, saying “no, no, no – you can’t put four Strads in one sale, it’ll flood the market. Let’s save one for the next sale”. Nowadays, we’re lucky to see one truly significant instrument come up every two years at auction. That’s not to say the auction houses aren’t seeing or obtaining these instruments, it’s simply that often they are better served by private sale.

That wasn’t the case for the Lady Blunt, though. When the Nippon Foundation, the most important collector of valuable instruments in the world, decided to sell the jewel in the crown of its collection to help its own people recover from its worst natural disaster, it may have taken a risk choosing the on-line auction house Tarisio, but it has paid off. My own feeling is that it would have made a similar amount on the private market but that a philanthropic act such as this warranted a philanthropic style of sale. Giving the public the chance to see this instrument, which was only ever really played when it was owned by Lady Ann Blunt (granddaughter of Lord Byron), was in itself philanthropic. Twenty years ago, it was possible to see these instruments lined up for study and comparison: these days it’s much harder to learn about them. Further, the internet-based Tarisio, with its long legs and ability to take the violin on tour all over the world – they earned every penny of their commission, a large proportion of which they have also donated to the Fund – meant that it was given the extensive exposure it deserved.  

So, at this quiet, family affair, the final stop in her epic road-trip, the reception was dominated by the Lady Blunt, hanging serenely in her glass cabinet in the centre of the room. It was a bit like being in the presence of a very beautiful, reclusive film star: no-one really wanted to be caught staring, but nevertheless couldn’t take their eyes off her. I, however, was not willing to miss what was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study this star quality just for the sake of not being rude and spent nearly an hour gazing at the most perfect example of a violin to hit the open market, arguably, since Sotheby’s sold this same violin in 1971.

An extraordinary fact about this violin is how new it looks. The greatest copyist of Stradivari violins was the 19th-Century maker and string expert Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume and if the Lady Blunt had come to me without my knowing what it was, my first reaction would have been to say it was a Vuillaume copy, simply because the condition of the Lady Blunt is what one might have expected of a Stradivari violin in the 19th Century. The Strads that Vuillaume was looking at 200 years ago were in a similar state of preservation as the Lady Blunt is now: it has crisp edges (the ‘ears’, the points at the top and bottom of the waist on either side, are beautifully sharp), the channelling around the purfling (the black lines which outline the body of the violin) is deep and unworn, and the scroll, if observed from the side, is so perfectly crafted and defined that it looks like a vortex optical illusion. The most striking thing, though, is the varnish. It has endured so little use that it has never needed any renewal or touching up, and this thin, translucent coating that only Stradivari was able to create is almost perfect, all over the instrument, bar a tiny amount of wear where the chin rest would have been. It looks like it isn’t quite dry: as if you could leave a thumb print on it (although best not to try), and it changes colour depending on which angle you regard it from, and under which light, like a hologram. 
 
When the closing time of the auction had shrunk to half an hour, two usernames were competing on the overhead computer screens, in £250,000 increments: one a long, seemingly random number beginning with “08”, the other “borodin”. It was hard to imagine that the international dialling code of “08” for Japan was a coincidence, and that “borodin” was going to be, say, French or American, so it was clear, without any surprises, that the finalists in this unique fight were almost certainly Japanese and Russian. The prosecco and expensive nibbles started to disappear speedily in what looked like direct parallel proportion to the increase in tension. There had been all sorts of over-excited speculation that the price would suddenly jump to $30,000,000 at the last minute (such is the futile practice of trying to put a financial value on perfection), but if either borodin or 08 had been willing to go that far, they didn’t need to. Bidding closed at 8.15pm at £8,750,000 (£9,800,000 including premium), with a roar and a round of applause. The best part of an eight-figure sum was quite enough.

I would be amazed if the as-yet unidentified buyer wasn’t Japanese but there is little doubt in my mind that we won’t be seeing this beautiful instrument again for a long time. It’s not to be played, everyone agreed: this violin, along with the “Messie”, needs to be maintained as a context for every violin that has been made since, with the least opportunity for it to degenerate. The other 598-odd Strads left in playing condition do quite enough to champion the golden Strad sound; this one needs to fly the flag for the physical beauty of Stradivari’s work. Whether it stays hidden or not the knowledge of its existence is a testament to human achievement, and with the money it made being ploughed directly into work on the ground in Japan, the reality of its existence will make the world a better place.