This Vuillaume violin was previously owned by Ysaye, Joseph Achron, Hillard Lubie, V. Renski, Richard Strawn, Barbara Miller, and Peter Paul Prier.

"Joseph Achron (1886-1943) was born in a small Lithuanian town called Lodzdzieje (now Lazdijai) on May 1/13, 1886.  He studied at Warsaw Conservatory and then at St. Petersburg Conservatory with the renowned Leopold Auer.  Achron graduated from the Conservatory with the highest prize in violin performance, in 1904.

In 1911, Achron was invited to join the music committee of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, an organization which had been founded three years earlier by former students of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Achron was so inspired, that he immediately went home and composed his first Jewish work, the 'Hebrew Melody' for violin and piano, which remains to this day his most popular composition.

Achron opened up a new branch of the Society for Jewish Folk Music in Kharkov, where he served as head of the violin and chamber music department at the Kharkov Conservatory. In 1922, Achron and his wife, the singer Marie Raphof, moved to Berlin, where Achron continued to compose, teach, and perform while serving as music advisor of the prominent 'Jibneh' publishing house.

On December 31, 1924, Joseph and Marie Achron arrived at Ellis Island from Cherbourg, France, thus marking the start of their busy ten-year stay in New York.  There, Achron composed chamber works for the local Yiddish theater, taught privately and at the Westchester Conservatory of Music, performed as soloist at the premiere of his First Violin Concerto, and took an active administrative role in the music scene of New York City.

In 1934, the Achrons moved to Los Angeles, where, he began to explore the world of film music, performing and composing for the studios, and devoted a great deal of time to private teaching and to administrative activism in the field of modern American music." (josephachron.org)