Andrew Fairfax (1953-2025)

PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF ANDREW FAIRFAX

27th October 2026 Auction – Lots 16-94

Andrew Fairfax (1953-2025) was one of Britain’s leading violin makers and restorers, and a great ambassador for the craft in this country. His death in 2025 came after a long illness, first revealed just after the death earlier in the same year of his mentor, Charles Beare; an intensely sad moment.

Andrew was born in Sevenoaks in 1953, proudly descended from Oliver Cromwell’s general Thomas Fairfax, and an Englishman – in fact a man of Kent, the county he never left for long – through and through. He came to violins through his engagement with folk music and entered the Newark School of Violin Making in 1979, where he met his future wife Anneleen van Der Grinten, who enrolled there in 1981. Her father Joost had a violin shop in Amersfoort, and Andrew went to work there until she had graduated herself.

Returning to Kent in 1983, he began work for Charles Beare, where he mastered the delicate restoration of precious instruments, and guided by Charles’ generous encouragement, began researching the histories of the instruments and their makers. A founding member of the British Violin Making Association and an active member of the Entente Internationale des Maîtres Luthiers et Archetiers, he began teaching across the world, but his natural affinity was for the history of the violin in England. He embarked on deep and painstaking researches into the lives of English makers, which led to the 1998 exhibition ‘The British Violin’ at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and resulted in the groundbreaking catalogue published by the B.V.M.A. in 2000. He worked on another B.V.M.A. publication in 2006, devoted to the Voller Brothers, until then generally derided as forgers, but at last given credit for the fine instruments they made. His great passion though was for the lives and work of the Anglo-Italian Panormo family, and another exhibition he curated in London in 2016 was effectively the starting point for his grand project.

He left Charles Beare’s workshop after thirty years, deciding to apply what he had learned there to his own new instruments, and spent the last decade making and restoring with Anneleen in their home in Tunbridge Wells, Andrew continuing his research on the Panormo family. While he himself would have been quick to say that the almost constant flow of new discoveries meant that it would never have been truly complete, the book we all looked forward to was left unfinished at the time of his death.

It is his integrity and loyalty which I will most remember him for. He was not a man to be swayed by insincere opinions or easy advantage, and never at the cost of his self-effacing humour, and dedication to the violin and its music, and his family.

Text by John Dilworth