User:Bowmaker

Basil de Visser was born in 1956 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

He began playing the violin at the age of 12, and later went on to study violin with Jaap Schröder at the Amsterdam Conservatoire. It was his beautiful Baroque violin playing which first sparked his interest in this wonderful instrument. After graduation he spent three years studying Baroque violin with Lucy van Dael.

In 1988, Basil was invited to join the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra in Toronto, Canada. It was there that he began making historical bows under the guidance of Stephen Marvin, who learnt the craft from the celebrated master bow maker William Salchow in New York. In 1990 he returned to Amsterdam, where he worked as a bow maker and Baroque violinist.

For more than thirty years, he has been making historical bows in his atelier in the heart of Amsterdam. Since May 2022 he is living and working in Rome, Italy.

Being an active Baroque violinist gives Basil the opportunity to test and fine-tune new bows in a professional context. In that way he is able to combine his knowledge and skills as a bow maker with the ‘hands-on’ expertise as a player. This enables Basil not only to reproduce the precise measurements of the original bow but also its exact response and ‘feel’.

Basil's musician colleagues also serve as an invaluable source of inspiration, information and feedback. He had the good fortune to see and copy many interesting original bows owned by professional string players.

Basil de Visser his bows are used by professional musicians active in the international early music scene, from Europe to the US, Japan and Taiwan.