In Focus: an 1810 violin by Nicolas Lupot

Nicolas Lupot was the son of François, a violin maker in Stuttgart. The family moved to Orléans when Nicolas was about ten years old, and his earliest work is branded ‘Lupot, Orléans’. In around 1794 he began supplying instruments to François-Louis Pique in Paris. Pique was the leading French maker at the time, but after Lupot began to work in Paris himself in 1794, he succeeded to that reputation before Pique’s retirement in 1816. At his shop at 24 rue de Gramont, established in 1798, his brother François Lupot was employed to make bows, and in 1802 Nicolas took on Charles François Gand as an apprentice. He was later joined by Auguste Bernardel, and the two went on to form the Gand & Bernardel company that subsequently became another of the great Parisian ateliers of the period…