Philippe Dupuy (1932-2021)
French violin maker Philippe Dupuy died on 5 April at the age of 88. The grandson of Eugene Sartory, he was the author of an illustrated history of his grandfather’s life, which was published in 2019. Since his retirement in 2006 he had been living in Ardèche, in the south of France.
Born on 6 October 1932, Dupuy was the son of violin maker Georges Dupuy, a founder member of the International Association of Violin and Bow Makers (EILA). Aged 14 he travelled to Mirecourt to study violin making under Léon Mougenot. He then worked for a number of years for Walter Hamma in Stuttgart, Germany, before returning to his father’s workshop in the Rue de Rome, Paris. He became the master of the workshop in 1968 following Georges Dupuy’s death, and continued to run the business until his retirement almost 40 years later. He was joined by bow maker Christophe Schaeffer in 1978, and Pierre Caradot in 2000. Caradot called him ‘a very elegant and refined person, with a huge amount of culture and an “English” sense of humour’.