Nicolas François Vuillaume

Nicolas François Vuillaume (1802 – 1876) was an important French luthier of the Vuillaume family, and younger brother of the illustrious Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume. He ran the leading workshop in Brussels, Belgium, and was appointed instrument maker to the Royal Conservatory in Brussels. His instruments won a number of medals at exhibitions.

Nicholas François Vuillaume (NFV) was born in Mirecourt, Vosges, in 1802, the fourth of five sons to Claude-François Vuillaume. The Vuillaume family had been luthiers in Mirecourt for several generations. Millant traces a family tree, identifying "for sure" a great-great-grandfather Claude-Francois Vuillaume (born about 1700). There is a legendary ancestor, one Jean Vuillaume, who was supposedly a pupil of Stradivari, but this remains a legend, and perhaps was invented as a joke. Most of the Vuillaume family were destined to become instrument makers, the most famous being NFV's elder brother, the second son Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume (JBV) who became perhaps France's pre-eminent maker and dealer in stringed instruments.

From the start, J.B. Vuillaume was the boldest, most audacious and most business-like of the family, moving to Paris at the age of 19, where he worked first in the workshops of François Chanot and Lete, and joining them in partnership before finally setting up his own. NFV, like his other siblings, joined his brother business in Paris, and initially made instruments that were labeled J B Vuillaume. While in Paris NFV quickly gained a fine reputation for producing outstanding instruments.

With an elder brother of the stature of J.B. Vuillaume, N.F. Vuillaume took perhaps the only course of action open to him in seeking to establish himself as a maker and dealer in his own right – he moved to set up his own establishment in Brussels, Belgium. (Millant gives this date as 1820, but 1830 seems more likely given the limited number of his named instruments dating from this period.) Though he owned his own shop, NFV continued to make instruments for JBV, and as JBV's business grew rapidly, NFV was his first choice for work. Examples attributed to NFV as late as 1857 imply that he continued to supply instruments to JBV in addition to those made in his brother's substantial workshop. This convenient arrangement may explain that it took until the year 1833 for NFV to label the 41st instrument in his own name.

Over the next few years N.F. Vuillaume sold instruments in his own name at a rate of around 10 a year. Away from the shadow of his brother, NFV flourished and by 1836 had been appointed instrument maker to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels. NFV won a clutch of medals at various exhibitions, including the Medal de Vermeil in 1841 and the Medal First Class at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855. In 1873 he was appointed Chevalier to the Order of Leopold. In terms of violin making, Belgium and the Vuillaume family is part of the French School, and for a time the two Vuillaume brothers were the pre-eminent figures in France and Belgium.

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