A violin used by Albert Einstein during his late teens and early adult life at Dominic Winter.
Estimated £200,000-300,000 at Dominic Winter on October 8, 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.
Internet bidding was not permitted and four phone bidders battled it out with a private buyer in Europe victorious. Including the buyer's premium they will pay £1.068m.
Bidding started at £150,000 and went up in £10,000 increments until £500,000 when it increased by £20,000. Three phone bidders were involved at the half a million pound level, with one phone bidder who dropped out coming back in. All the bidders were private buyers from the UK or Europe.
Prior to the auction a number of bidders had asked whether the violin could be played professionally on a regular basis. Following a formal condition report and hearing it played professionally Dominic Winter was able to confirm it could be.
The price is a house record for the South Cerney, Gloucestershire firm. Its previous house record was £190,000 hammer price for the 19th century Edinburgh Calotype Club photograph albumwhich sold on December 12, 2001.
Musician
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.
Besides the maker's label visible inside, it is etched to the back with the word Lina (short for violina) by Einstein.
Twenty years later, von Laue gifted the items to Margarete Hommrich from Braunschweig and it was her great-great granddaughter who was 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.”
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."
The violin offered at Dominic Winter is etched with the word Lina (short for violina) by Einstein himself.
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 also included the Nelson saddle for Einstein’s bicycle that had also been left to von Laue. However the lot was passed and will be offered in a future sale.
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’. It sold for a hammer price of £2200 to an online bidder.
