Albert Einstein's Violin Sells for Nearly £1 Million at Bidding Event
An musical instrument once in the possession of the renowned physicist has fetched nearly a million pounds in a bidding event.
This Zunterer violin from 1894 is considered to have been the scientist's initial instrument and had been at first expected to sell for approximately three hundred thousand pounds as it went on the block in South Cerney, Gloucestershire.
A book on philosophy that Einstein gave to an acquaintance also sold at a price of £2.2k.
All final bids will have a further commission of 26.4% added to them, which means the total cost for the violin will rise above £1m.
Auctioneers believe that once the fees are added, the transaction may become the highest ever for a violin not once played by a professional musician or crafted by Stradivari – while the earlier record achieved by a musical item that was possibly performed aboard the Titanic.
One cycling saddle once possessed by the physicist failed to sell at the auction and may be re-listed.
The objects presented in the sale had been given to his close friend and scientist Max von Laue in the latter part of 1932.
Not long after, he departed to the US to avoid the increase of prejudice and Nazism in his homeland.
Von Laue gifted them to an acquaintance and Einstein fan, Margarete Hommrich 20 years later, and it was her great-great granddaughter that has put them up for sale.
A second violin formerly possessed by Einstein, that was presented to the scientist when he arrived in the United States during 1933, was sold in a sale for $516.5k (£370,000) in New York back in 2018.
