Lady Anne Blunt and Her 1721 Stradivarius: A Master Horse Breeder but an “Excruciating” Violinist (According to Her Husband)

By Tobi Lopez Taylor

This esssay is part of the ongoing Crabbet Chronicles series, which also includes posts on Alec Guinness in Star Wars and Lawrence of Arabia, and Bendira, a Crabbet-bred mare owned by Eve Balfour. 

If her name is familiar today at all, Lady Anne Blunt—born Anne Isabella King-Noel—may be known to English majors as the granddaughter of Lord Byron and the long-suffering wife of the minor poet and major philanderer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

Computer geeks may recognize Lady Anne as the daughter of Ada Lovelace, arguably the world’s first computer programmer; Ada Lovelace Day, held on the second Tuesday of each October, is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and math. The computer program ADA, a nod to Lovelace, was created in 1980 on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Arabian horse fanciers still admire and revere Lady Anne Blunt for her extensive, often arduous travels in the Middle East with husband Wilfrid, in search of the finest Arabian bloodstock with which to found the Crabbet Arabian Stud at Crabbet Park, their estate in Sussex. From there, the Blunts sold and exported horses they had bred to all points of the globe, including North America, Australia, and Africa. Today, virtually all living Arabians claim descent from horses bred at Crabbet Stud.

 And musicians, especially violinists, may know her as the owner of the Lady Blunt Stradivarius, a violin made in 1721, which has been called one of the best-preserved Stradivari-made violins in existence. Lady Anne purchased her instrument in 1864, five years before her marriage to Wilfrid, from a luthier named Jean-Baptiste Villaume, who acquired it from Count Cozio di Salabue. Lady Anne has been called an “accomplished” violinist by some of her biographers.  It is said that she studied with at least two well-known teachers:  Joseph Joachim, one of the most important violinists of his time, and Leopold Jansa, who also taught composer Karl Goldmark and Wilma Neruda (later Lady Halle); the latter was named Violinist to the Queen by Britain’s Queen Alexandra.

However, Lady Anne’s husband found listening to Anne practice “excruciating,” and derided her playing as “fiddling.” As a result, Anne took to playing when Wilfrid was away (which was often), or outside; one day in February 1887, Lady Anne played her Stradivarius under an orange tree at Sheykh Obeyd, her estate outside Cairo: “It was delightful—a perfect afternoon.” Even if Wilfrid was correct that she wasn’t a technically very competent player, Lady Anne did have a highly developed appreciation of beauty and artistry—she was a talented painter and the horses she bred were world class—and she would have valued the Stradivarius as an object d’art as well as for the tones it produced.

The auction house Tarisio provides an extensive chain of ownership for the instrument, noting that Lady Anne sold her violin “through Emil Hamma to the German dealer Edler in 1895 just prior to his death. It was purchased by W. E. Hill & Sons the following year and sold immediately to their most important client, the collector Baron Johann Knoop. Knoop parted with the violin in 1900 and shortly thereafter it was sold by Hills to Mr. J. E. Street of Caterham, a celebrated amateur violinist and underwriter of Lloyds. Street purchased the violin for his son Edmund, who was a promising young violinist. The younger Street tragically died in the First World War and thereafter the violin was sold again by Hills in 1915 to the most important collector of his time, Richard Bennett. On Bennett’s death in 1930 the violin was purchased by Hills and remained in their collection until 1941 when they sold it through the dealer Robert Bower to the Swiss dealer and collector Henry Werro in whose possession it remained for nearly 20 years. Werro produced a small monograph on the violin of which only 200 copies were published. It was next sold in 1959, again by Hills, to the noted American collector, Sam Bloomfield of California, who later offered it in 1971 at Sotheby’s auction. [It was played at that time by the esteemed Yehudi Menuhin, who can be heard here.] It sold then for the record price of £84,500.00 ($200,000 at the time) to Hills on behalf of Robin Loh, the collector of Singapore. Loh lent the violin to the 1987 Stradivari exhibition in Cremona organized by Charles Beare and kept the violin until 2000, when it was sold by Andrew Hill to a private collector.”

“The violin was more recently sold to the Nippon Foundation by their advisor, Andrew Hill, and sold on their behalf by Tarisio in 2011 for an again record price of £9.8 million ($15.9 million). All proceeds went to benefit the victims of the Japanese tsunami and earthquake.” That an instrument which provided Lady Anne Blunt so many hours of pleasure should prove helpful to those in need would have made her heart sing. As her daughter Judith Blunt-Lytton, Lady Wentworth, wrote at the time of her mother’s death, “To the end of her life she had the heart of a child, the brain of a scholar, and the soul of a saint.”