Joseph Hill

Hill's finest achievements are his cellos: built on a good modern pattern, well-judged in proportion, tonally capable instruments that remain sought after by professional players today, a distinction few English makers of his period can claim. His contralto violas run them close, sharing the same generosity of proportion and the same readiness to speak. The best of his signed violins, finished in a richer golden or red-brown varnish than his ordinary trade work, show a maker working well above the London average of his day, and it is in these pieces that his command of the Amati model is most apparent, set distinctly apart from the Stainer-derived patterns that governed his everyday output.
His output was deliberately tiered, a fact his surviving instruments make plain to anyone who handles enough of them. Trade pieces were made efficiently and without pretension, varnished thinly, finished to a standard that satisfied the market without exceeding it. Signed work received his best materials, his closest attention, and the deep, confident varnish for which his finest instruments are known. Some instruments survive only under the labels of the provincial dealers he supplied, a practice common enough in the trade of the period, but one that can complicate attribution today.
Hill trained under Peter Wamsley at the Harp and Hautboy in Piccadilly, a workshop that also formed Benjamin Banks, and arrived in London around 1746, established independently by 1753. He moved through several Westminster addresses before settling, in 1765, at the Haymarket beside the King's Theatre, where the business traded for a time, from 1773, as Joseph Hill and Sons. He died in 1784, buried in Hanover Square, having retired to Avery Row on New Bond Street.
Five of his six sons became violin makers. Through Lockey Hill, and then Henry Lockey Hill, the family's standard was sustained and sharpened across a second and third generation, until William Ebsworth Hill, working from that same Avery Row address, founded W. E. Hill & Sons: the firm that would go on to dominate the international violin trade for a century, advising the great collections of Europe and America on questions of attribution that the trade still defers to.