A violin used by Albert Einstein during his late teens and early adult life, estimated £200,000-300,000 at Dominic Winter.
The 1894 instrument, made by the Munich-based luthier Anton Zunterer, was bought by Einstein shortly before he left the city to continue his schooling in Arrau, Switzerland. Besides the maker's label visible inside, it is etched to the back with the word Lina (short for violina) by Einstein.
Einstein played the violin almost every day and said he would have liked to have been a musician had he not been a theoretical physicist. His second wife Elsa said she fell in love with him “because he played Mozart so beautifully on the violin”.
He owned several violins during his adult life, giving this one to his friend and fellow physicist Max von Laue in late 1932, when he left Germany for America.
Twenty years later, von Laue gifted the items to Margarete Hommrich from Braunschweig and it is her great-great granddaughter who is offering them for sale.
“Einstein's violin is a particularly precious and exciting item to handle,” said senior auctioneer and historical memorabilia specialist Chris Albury. “We know that he named all his violins 'Lina', so to see this etched onto the back panel was hair-raising. We have estimated it at £200,000-300,000”.
The next fully documented violin Einstein owned was bought in 1919, and it seems likely that was the violin he took with him when he left for the US at the end of 1932. A third instrument was given to Einstein by luthier Oscar H Steger when he arrived in the US in 1933: this was the piece sold for $516,500 (£370,000) by Bonhams in New York in March 2018.
“In my opinion, this Zunterer ‘Lina’ violin is more important,” says Albury, “as it would seem to be the one he would have been playing through his early adult life, most notably when he published his important papers on relativity in 1905 and 1915."
During the so-called ‘Annus Mirabilis’ of 1905, the 26-year-old Einstein published four ground-breaking papers – on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity and mass-energy equivalence – that revolutionised physics.
The Dominic Winter sale includes a saddle for Einstein’s bicycle together with the original order form, estimated £30,000-50,000.
The Dominic Winter sale also includes the Nelson saddle for Einstein’s bicycle that had also been left to von Laue. He disposed of the bicycle when it seized up, but he kept this leather saddle as it was so comfortable. Remarkably, the original order form, completed, dated and signed in Einstein's hand was also retained and is offered with the saddle with an estimate of £30,000-50,000.
“We consider the bicycle saddle (and signed order form) a very special item too. Einstein was a keen cyclist and cycled, not just for transport, but for inspiration for his scientific ideas,” said Albury.
Estimated at £2000-3000 is a Descartes and Spinoza philosophy book, signed in pencil twice by Einstein on the spine label. It was given to him by his father Hermann to encourage the learning of Latin but also helped in the formation of Einstein’s ideas around the philosophy of religion and the existence of God. He championed the 'pantheistic' ideas of Spinoza famously stating, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God’.
