Notable Sales: Antonio Stradivari | Violin, 1717
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Ex-Piatti
Cremona, 1717
labelled Antonius Stradiuarius Cremonensis Faciebat Anno 1717 AS
length of back 35.4cm.
The 1717 ‘ex-Piatti’ had four owners on record about whom little is known. George Ashley, Mr Johnson, and J. Burnand, and, finally, Mr Emmington of Kent, who bought the violin in 1836 and sold it quickly on to Arthur Betts. Arthur was the younger brother of John Betts, one of the most important and influential violin makers in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A good maker himself, Arthur managed the shop with his brother until taking over on his own after John’s death in 1823. From Arthur, the ‘ex-Piatti’ passed to Simon Andrew Forster, the last violin maker of the Forster family.
Carlo Alfredo Piatti, from whom the violin received its name, bought the instrument from Forster in 1862. Piatti began playing the violin at a very young age but quickly moved to the cello and was sent to his uncle aged 5 for tuition. It is thought that he made his concert debut in his local theatre aged 7 for a mere 10 Francs, of which his uncle kept half. When he was 10, Piatti applied for a scholarship to the Milan conservatoire and was granted admittance with a 5 year scholarship. In 1837 he gave his solo debut at the conservatoire, playing his own concerto, and was given his cello as a prize.
A few years later, Piatti fell ill and was forced to sell his cello to cover the costs of his treatment, but he travelled to Paris, borrowed an amateur’s cello, and gave a concert which impressed Liszt to such a degree that he gifted Piatti an Amati cello. In the same year, 1844, he debuted in London at the same concert as Joseph Joachim’s London debut and was praised by critics for his extraordinary excellence. In 1867 Piatti bought a Stradivari cello which is also named after him. A marble bust of Piatti, attributed to Giacomo Manzoni of Bergamo, was gifted to the Royal Academy of Music by Piatti’s daughter in 1909.
John Pawle bought the violin from Piatti in 1868 and it passed to Gabriele Wietrowitz in 1892. Wietrowitz was an Austrian concert violinist and academic who studied under Joseph Joachim at the Akademische Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. She toured Europe and debuted in London in 1892, where she was received very well. She became the first violinist of the string quartet of Emily Shinner in 1897.
The ‘ex-Piatti’ was bought circa 1920 by Jacob Wolfgang Hakkert of Rotterdam, luthier to the Amsterdam Conservatoire. W.E. Hill & Sons acquired the violin in 1921 and sold it, through Wurlitzer, to Dr. Eugenio Sturchio, who’s collection included no fewer than 7 Strads, as well as a Pietro Guarneri and a Ferdinando Gagliano. Dr. Sturchio, once he had emigrated from Italy to the US in 1923, sold the ‘ex-Piatti’ to John W. Coggeshall through Nathan E. Posner of Brooklyn.
Alfred O. Corbin, a New York banker, bought the violin in 1929 for $50,000 but didn’t keep it for very long, selling it in 1930 through Wurlitzer to Miles Frank Yount, an oilman and collector of both violins and horses. Yount helped to introduce the rotary oil rig, a piece of specialised drilling equipment, to the Gulf coast. In 1913 he set up his own oil company which, in 1925 struck previously undiscovered oil below the Spindletop oil field, the birthplace of the modern petroleum industry, sparking the second Spindletop oil boom.
After Yount’s death in 1933 the ‘ex-Piatti’ passed to his widow, who sold it in 1945 to Capton Michael Paul, formerly Paul Machael Iogolevitch, a violinist who had served in the Russian army in World War I before emigrating to the US. He found his fortune in the petroleum industry and co-founded the Bay and Paul Foundation, which gave grants not only for music, but also for education, ecological conservation, art conservation, and to Native Americans and indigenous populations. Paul made the news in New York after giving $1 million for a recital hall at the Juilliard School in 1965.
After his death in 1980, Paul left the violin to his sister, Raymonde Paul, who kept it until her own death in 1985, when it passed to their estate. The ‘ex-Piatti’ was sold anonymously through Sotheby’s in their March 1986 sale for $155,000 and it was bought by its current owner in 2019.
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