I’ve come across a company www.georgejackson.com who have been in business since 1780 and originally supplied Erard who was charged £66, apparently in 1811 (‘To 55 harps ornamentd compleat @ 24/-) with some of the compo decoration for the Grecian harps. George Jackson Ltd. still has the original sample board, photo below, and many of the original wooden moulds. Just wondered if anyone was aware of this resource?
Dear colleagues,
many thanks for sharing this information. I have been in contact with the George Jackson company since 2015 regarding the Erard moulds. In April 2016 I personally visited the company's premises for research related to my current harp project at the Deutsches Museum, Munich (the German museum Jon mentioned in his comment). Back then I had an interesting talk with the director, David Serra, who kindly showed me around the workshop and explained to me the process of making composition ornaments. I also took some photos of the large board, which includes a set of ornaments for Erard's Grecian model. According to David Serra, the Erard moulds are mostly boxwood moulds; the company owns thousands of such moulds, with samples mounted on boards like this at their premises. I also managed to locate some generic moulds for ornaments used on harps, such as lines of beads applied on the bottom of the capital or the soundbox. I have presented and discussed these moulds in my conference papers:
Panagiotis Poulopoulos, ‘Shedding New Light on the Production Strategies of Erard’. Joint Conference of the Galpin Society and the American Musical Instrument Society (AMIS), Musical Instrument Museums (MIMEd), Edinburgh, 1 to 4 June 2017.
Panagiotis Poulopoulos, ‘Composition Ornaments on Historic Harps: From Research to Exhibition’. Annual Conference of CIMCIM ‘Presentation, Preservation, Interpretation – The Challenges of Musical Instrument Collections in the 21st Century’, co-organized by various institutions in Basel and Bern, 22 to 25 February 2017.
I have also discussed briefly Jackson's work for Erard in the following articles:
Panagiotis Poulopoulos and Julin Lee, ‘A Synergy of Form, Function and Fashion in the Manufacture of the Erard Harp’ in Marco A. Pérez and Emanuele Marconi (eds.), Wooden Musical Instruments: Different Forms of Knowledge (Paris: Cité de la Musique - Philharmonie de Paris, 2018), pp. 367-398.
Panagiotis Poulopoulos, Marisa Pamplona, Luise Richter, and Elke Cwiertnia, ‘Technological Study of the Decoration on an Erard Harp from 1818’, Studies in Conservation (to be published in 2019).
I hope that further research will enhance our knowledge about the moulds themselves as well as about aspects of subcontracting in the instrument-making business. Please keep us informed in case you arrange a visit to Jackson's.
Best wishes
Panos