Joseph René Lafleur

Joseph René Lafleur was born in Paris on 8 June 1812, the son of the violin and bow maker Jacques Lafleur and his wife Françoise Jacqueline Cheron. By his own family's account and the trade literature of the time, his father trained him first as a violinist rather than a maker — though it's reasonable to think he was practising ...Read More both violin- and bow-making alongside his playing well before he committed seriously to bow-making from 1830 onward, continuing to work on violins too, in his father's manner, for some time after.

Jacques died in 1833, and the 21-year-old Joseph René went to work for François Lupot II to round out his training. His earliest bows are often mistaken for his master's own — very fine heads, plain, rather long and low frogs with a lightly rounded edge to the ferrule. Once he'd left Lupot's employ, he set up on his own at 9 Rue du Petit Carreau, in Paris's 3rd arrondissement, and began experimenting seriously with form and structural strength: unusually oval-sectioned sticks laminated in five lengthwise pieces like plywood for extra rigidity, a notched head construction (a wedge of wood glued into an incision, thicker toward the head-plate and thinner toward the neck) that he applied to both these laminated sticks and his ordinary ones, and Léonard Tourte's technique of cutting the two head chamfers so they meet at the centre.

His first wife, Catherine Rouget, died young; his second, Thérèse Wagner, bore him a son, Louis Alphonse, who himself became a violin maker and signed a handful of bows. Joseph René signed his own death certificate "Lafleur Aîné" (the elder) — proof there must have been at least one more, younger son besides Louis Alphonse, though none is otherwise documented here. He was still listed in the 1874 Paris trade directory, at Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, the year he died. Read Less

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