W. E. Hill & Sons Firm

Bow maker / Violin maker
(1880 – 1992)

The London-based firm W.E. Hill & Sons dominated the fine instrument and bow market in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Its far-sighted approach to restoration preserved many important classical Italian instruments and the Hill name became a byword for expertise.

The firm was founded in 1880 by William Ebsworth ...Read More Hill, who established its reputation for fine restoration work, pioneering many new techniques. He also trained his four sons, William Henry, Arthur Frederick, Alfred Ebsworth and Walter Edgar, to continue his work following his death in 1895. Led by Alfred Ebsworth, they built an unrivaled reputation for expertise, publishing seminal books on Stradivari and the Guarneri family.

The Hill workshop also employed many fine makers in the manufacture of instruments and cases, but their speciality was bows. Among the firm’s most celebrated bow makers are James Tubbs, Samuel Allen, William Charles Retford and Albert Leeson. Alfred Hill instituted an established style for the firm’s bows based on the Tourte violin bow and Voirin cello bow, uniting individual makers’ work into a distinctly British product of uniformly high quality.

After several successions, more or less within the Hill family, the firm was most recently headed by Desmond D’Artey Hill’s sons, Andrew and David, before being dissolved in 1992. Read Less