Violin Valuation Near Me? Nearer Than You Think

It is Summer, which is when I tend to get round to doing some website housekeeping. My recent discovery was the number of people who search “violin valuation near me” into Google. It makes sense. In the space of four days I have searched for “water-leak detection” and, much more urgently, once they had arrived “gas pipe repair near me”. So I get it. I use the same terms myself.*

The answer in our case, is pleasingly literal – we can come to you.

Several times a year Amati runs valuation days in cities across the UK and the United States. As I write we have Bath, Philadelphia and New York in the diary within a single fortnight, and there is always another one coming – the current list lives at amati.com/book.

Here is how a valuation day works. You book a slot, you bring the violin – or the cello, the viola, or the bow that has been puzzling you – and you sit down with one of our specialists for fifteen minutes or so. You leave with an honest view of what it might fetch at auction. There is no charge and no obligation.

A few things worth bringing beyond the instrument itself:

1 – Any paperwork. Old receipts, certificates, letters from dealers, insurance valuations – even the ones you suspect are wrong.

2 – The family story. Who played it, where it was bought, how it crossed the Atlantic. Some of it will be unreliable. Bring it anyway – provenance often hides in the unreliable bits.

3 – The bow. People leave bows at home because they assume they are worthless. Some bows are worth more than the violin they came with.

I should be honest about the other side of it. Not every violin labelled Stradivarius is a Stradivarius – in fact almost none of them are, a subject we have covered elsewhere on this blog. Sometimes we are the bearers of modest news, and we try to break it kindly. But it cuts both ways. Every so often something comes out of an attic that makes the whole day worthwhile.

The worst outcome, truthfully, is not the disappointing label. It is the good instrument left unexamined for another thirty years while the cracks open up – or worse, woodworm.

If there is no valuation day near you at the moment, you don’t have to wait. Send us photographs through amati.com/book and we will give you a preliminary view by email. And if you are wondering what your violin might actually be worth before you do any of this, we have written about that too: How much is my violin worth? I should mention in passing that literally every single one of the photographs I am using of myself doing valuations have very little connection to reality. The photographs are eight years old and quite a lot of life has happened to me in the meantime. Age has withered me and time definitely condemned. I will get new photographs taken as soon as I can face reality. *For those who might be in the same boat the answer is get in the experts and make it clear that their expensively assembled team should not include a work experiencer with a pick-axe. Amati holds regular valuation days across the UK and US, and offers free online valuations year-round. You can book a free violin valuation near you.