1840's Martin & Coupa Spanish Style Guitar
The "Spanish" Martin is a distinct style with specific features,
including a line though the middle of the sides, a delicate tapered heel,
fan bracing, and a Spanish Foot.
Formerly of the Steve Howe Collection.
This example epitomizes the Martin guitar
at a critical point in it's evolution. The "Spanish" Martin is a
distinct style with specific features clearly
showing Martin's awareness of the pre-Torres guitar of Spain.
This guitar retains features of Martin's earliest Viennese influenced
guitars,
including the "Stauffer Style" headstock with "Vienna Gears", while
adding features of the Spanish guitar.
This fine example of perhaps the earliest of Martin's versions of a
Spanish guitar has many prototypical Spanish features: cedar
neck with
elegantly curved Spanish heel, Spanish style interior false foot, tie
style bridge with ivory inset, fan braces, two piece rosewood sides
with simple
lengthwise center strip dividing the two pieces, and both bindings and
simple back strip with straight lines
made of holly extending into the heel.
This guitar is also an early example of features which would become
hallmarks of Martin design for years to come, such as the ebony
pyramid style
bridge, and Martin's version of the Spanish body shape with a smaller
upper bout than the Viennese influenced guitars.
This could be the earliest Martin we've seen to have solid Brazilian
rosewood backs and sides in place of a back of rosewood veneer.
The importance of this particular example as a transitional guitar with
the head design of the Viennese Staufer, the fan bracing, cedar neck with
Spanish heel, interior foot, tied bridge, and two-piece sides of a
pre-Torres Spanish guitar, and Martin's new body shape and pyramid bridge
design, is described by Evans:
"This instrument has a combination of features that is, to our knowledge,
unique on a Martin guitar. The head design is similar to that used
by Martin in the 1830's, with the tuning machines concealed under a metal
plate and buttons on one side, after the manner of Staffer. The
body, however, does not have the Staufer-inspired, wasp-waisted shape of
the 1830's, but is closer to the mature Martin style of twenty years
later. The shape suggests strongly that Marin had had the
opportunity to examine a Spanish-made guitar of about 1840, and was
experimenting with Spanish-style construction."
"This supposition is reinforced by the presence of Spanish features such
as we have seen on no other Martin guitar, including simple fan bracing
with three radiating struts, and a Spanish head and slipper foot into
which the sides are slotted. The division of the rosewood sides by a
narrow decorative hardwood strip is another feature borrowed from the
nineteenth-century Spanish guitars. The presence of this strip
weakens the sides; to give them strength, Martin fitted several vertical
braces int which the cross struts of the top and back are notched, framing
up the body."
"The design of the bridge is very modern for it's date. In shape it
conforms to the "pyramid" bridge pattern used by Martin throughout the
latter half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the
twentieth. But this is one of the very few nineteenth-century Martin
guitars to be made with a tied rather than a pin bridge. The strings
pass over a broad, backward sloping ivory saddle-piece before being
secured at the rear of the bridge."
"This guitar proves that C.F. Martin was one of the few makers outside
Spain in the early nineteenth century to be aware of the possibility of
fan strutting on the guitar, and that he experimented with it before
developing his own famous X-bracing system. It shows the American
gut-stringed guitar, the ancestor of the steel-sting guitar, at a critical
point of it's evolution, about to break away from the diverse European
influences to which it owed it's beginnings."
The unique headstock design of this example further reinforces the
transitional nature of this guitar. The Staufer style head with
Viennese gears combined with this style of attachment to the neck, with
the volute common on Martins to this day, is quite the surprise, never
seen on another Martin. All other Viennese gears seen on Martin
guitars to date have had metal tuning buttons.
Illustrated in Washburn & Johnston,
"Martin Guitars: An Illustrated Celebration of America's Premier
Guitarmaker":
"The most interesting
parts of this Martin & Coupa are what you can't see. The
neck has a Spanish-shaped heel, with the sides slotted into a
neck block with an interior "foot". The top is also fan braced,
a feature this guitar shares with several other Martin & Coupa
instruments. Other small
details from this experimental period at Cherry Hill strongly suggest
that C.F. Sr. was turning away from Northern European guitar design
and
incorporating ideas found on Spanish instruments predating guitarmaker
Antonio Torres's guitars.
Washburn & Johnston p 35.
The Steve Howe Guitar Collection pp. 77, 78, 79
Illustrated in Evans, "Guitars: Music,
History, Construction and the Players, from Renaissance to Rock"
While interviews related to a
recent museum exhibit of early Martin guitars infers
that the "Spanish Connection" is a recent discovery, the
importance of this instrument in illustrating the significance of the
influence to C.F. Martin of the "Pre-Torres' guitars of Cadiz, Spain
was clearly
recognized here by Evans, in these words published 46 years ago, in
1977, and reprised in the 1997 writing of Washburn and Johnston:
"This instrument has a combination of features that is, to our
knowledge, unique on a Martin guitar. The head design is similar
to that used by
Martin in the 1830's, with the tuning machines concealed under a metal
plate and buttons on one side, after the manner of Stauffer. The
body,
however, does not have the Stauffer-inspired, wasp-waisted shape of
the 1830's, but is closer to the mature Martin style of twenty years
later.
The shape suggests strongly that Martin had had the opportunity to
examine a Spanish-made guitar of about 1840, and was
experimenting with Spanish-style construction."
"This supposition is reinforced by the presence of Spanish features
such as we have seen on no other Martin guitar, including simple fan
bracing with three radiating struts, and a Spanish head and slipper
foot into which the sides are slotted. The division of the
rosewood sides by a
narrow decorative hardwood strip is another feature borrowed from the
nineteenth-century Spanish guitars. The presence of this strip
weakens
the sides; to give them strength, Martin fitted several vertical
braces into which the cross struts of the top and back are notched,
framing up the body."
"The design of the bridge is very modern for it's date. In shape
it conforms to the "pyramid" bridge pattern used by Martin throughout
the latter
half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the
twentieth. But this is one of the very few nineteenth-century
Martin guitars to be made with a
tied rather than a pin bridge. The strings pass over a broad,
backward sloping ivory saddle-piece before being secured at the rear
of the bridge."
"This guitar proves that C.F. Martin was one of the few makers outside
Spain in the early nineteenth century to be aware of the possibility
of fan strutting
on the guitar, and that he experimented with it before developing his
own famous X-bracing system. It shows the American gut-stringed
guitar, the
ancestor of the steel-sting guitar, at a critical point of it's
evolution, about to break away from the diverse European influences to
which it owed it's beginnings."
Evans pp. 235-236
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