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Title: Chats on Old Clocks
Author: Hayden, Arthur
Language: English
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BOOKS FOR COLLECTORS
_With Frontispieces and many Illustrations_
_Large Crown 8vo, cloth._
CHATS ON ENGLISH CHINA.
By ARTHUR HAYDEN.
CHATS ON OLD FURNITURE.
By ARTHUR HAYDEN.
CHATS ON OLD PRINTS.
(How to collect and value Old Engravings.)
By ARTHUR HAYDEN.
CHATS ON COSTUME.
By G. WOOLLISCROFT RHEAD.
CHATS ON OLD LACE AND NEEDLEWORK.
By E. L. LOWES.
CHATS ON ORIENTAL CHINA.
By J. F. BLACKER.
CHATS ON OLD MINIATURES.
By J. J. FOSTER, F.S.A.
CHATS ON ENGLISH EARTHENWARE.
(Companion volume to "Chats on English China.")
By ARTHUR HAYDEN.
CHATS ON AUTOGRAPHS.
By A. M. BROADLEY.
CHATS ON PEWTER.
By H. J. L. J. MASSÉ, M.A.
CHATS ON POSTAGE STAMPS.
By FRED. J. MELVILLE.
CHATS ON OLD JEWELLERY AND TRINKETS
By MACIVER PERCIVAL.
CHATS ON COTTAGE AND FARMHOUSE FURNITURE.
(Companion volume to "Chats on Old Furniture.")
By ARTHUR HAYDEN.
CHATS ON OLD COINS.
By FRED. W. BURGESS.
CHATS ON OLD COPPER AND BRASS.
By FRED. W. BURGESS.
CHATS ON HOUSEHOLD CURIOS.
By FRED. W. BURGESS.
CHATS ON OLD SILVER.
By ARTHUR HAYDEN.
CHATS ON JAPANESE PRINTS.
By ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE.
CHATS ON MILITARY CURIOS.
By STANLEY C. JOHNSON.
CHATS ON OLD CLOCKS AND WATCHES.
By ARTHUR HAYDEN.
LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.,
NEW YORK: F. A. STOKES COMPANY.
[Illustration]
CHATS ON OLD CLOCKS
BY
ARTHUR HAYDEN
AUTHOR OF "CHATS ON COTTAGE AND FARMHOUSE FURNITURE,"
"CHATS ON OLD PRINTS," ETC.
WITH A FRONTISPIECE AND 80 ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN LTD.
ADELPHI TERRACE
_First published in 1917_
(_All rights reserved_)
DEDICATION
TIME, you laggard, take my little book,
And point to those who have a curious mind
That record herein they may hidden find
Of Huygens' wordy war with Dr. Hooke:
Of David Ramsay's search for secret hoard:
Of Thomas Chamberlaine de Chelmisforde.
Many a maker left his graven name,--
That by your leave stands yet on dial plate,--
With legend _Fecit_, of uncertain date,
Proud with the hope that time would bring him fame.
Death stopped the wheels of maker and machine:
TIME! will you not their memory keep green?
TIME, take my tribute to your flying feet;
Paper will shortly crumble into dust.
You guard the guerdon free from moth and rust,
Your even finger sifts the chaff from wheat;
Hold me from hurt, I worship at your shrine
With every pulse-beat,--Father, make me thine.
A.H.
PREFACE
A preface should be personal. An author who writes on such subjects as
Old Furniture and Old China, with a view to educating public taste and
attempting to show why certain objects should be regarded more lovingly
than others, meets with a volume of correspondence from collectors.
Threaded through such correspondence, extended over a long period, I
find the constant demand for a volume dealing with old clocks in a
popular manner.
There is no house without its clock or clocks, and few collectors
of old furniture have excluded clocks from their hobby. I have been
therefore blamed that I did not include some more detailed treatment
of clocks in my volumes on "Old Furniture" and "Cottage and Farmhouse
Furniture," my readers very justly advancing the argument that clocks
form part of the study of domestic furniture as a whole.
This may be admitted. But in the endeavour to satisfy such a want on
the part of my clients, I plead that the subject of clockmaking is one
to which years of study must be devoted.
Since the first appearance of my _Chats on Old Furniture_ in 1905,
I have not been unmindful of the co-related subject of old clocks.
Over ten years of study, running parallel with my other work on the
evolution of ornament and decoration of the English home, has enabled
me to gather a mass of material and to attempt to satisfy the request
for a complementary volume to my _Chats on Old Furniture_ and _Chats on
Cottage and Farmhouse Furniture_.
To this end I have embodied in this present volume many facts relating
to provincial styles as well as Scottish and Irish types, with lists of
local makers not before published.
To the critics to whom I have hitherto been indebted for realizing
the niche I desire to fill with my volumes, I preface this volume by
stating that as far as possible the technicalities of clockmaking have
been eliminated. The average reader and the average collector would
be bored by such details, although some of us might like to see them
included. I have not referred to foreign clockmaking, nor to famous
church and turret clocks, nor to marvels of horology; I have advisedly
limited my field to the English domestic clock. That such a treatment
would appeal more to the collector is my personal opinion, and I trust
my critics may incline to my view.
The illustrations in the volume have been chosen to illustrate the
letterpress and to illuminate points I endeavour to make in regard to
the evolution of the various types coming under my observation.
I have to express my indebtedness to the authorities of the British
Museum for permission to include illustrations of examples in that
collection, and I am similarly indebted to the authorities of the
National Museum, Dublin.
By the courtesy of the Corporation of Nottingham I am reproducing
a clock in their collection, and similarly by the courtesy of the
Bristol Corporation I am including an example in their possession.
The Corporation of Glasgow have afforded me permission to include
a remarkable example of Scottish work, and the authorities of the
Metropolitan Museum, New York, have accorded me a similar privilege in
illustrating specimens in their collection.
Among those who have generously augmented my researches and come to my
aid in regard to local makers, I desire to express my obligation to
George H. Hewitt, Esq., J.P., of Liverpool, who arranged the clocks in
the exhibit at the Liverpool Tercentenary Exhibition in 1907, and to E.
Rimbault Dibdin, Esq., of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. To Basil
Anderton, Esq., of the Public Libraries, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and to
T. Leo Reid, Esq., of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I am especially grateful
for solid help in regard to North Country makers. To H. Tapley-Soper,
Esq., City Librarian, Exeter, I am indebted for names of West-Country
makers, and to A. Bromley Sanders, Esq., of Exeter, I am obliged for
information relating to local clocks coming under his purview for
many years. James Davies, Esq., of Chester, and S. H. Hamer, Esq.,
of Halifax, have enlarged my horizon in regard to local makers. H.
Wingent, Esq., of Rochester, an enthusiastic collector and connoisseur
of old clocks, has kindly enabled me to reproduce one of his examples.
To Herbert Bolton, Esq., of the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, I am
indebted for the inclusion of a fine specimen in that collection.
I desire especially to record the generous aid I have had from Percy
Webster, Esq., of Great Portland Street, London, who is well known as a
connoisseur of old clocks, and from his son, Malcolm R. Webster, Esq.,
who have given me practical assistance in regard to verifying facts
from actual examples.
To Thomas Rennie, Esq., of the Glasgow Art Galleries and Museums, I
desire to record thanks. To Edward Campbell, Esq., of Glasgow, who has
enriched my volume with examples of Scottish work in his collection, I
am indebted for information regarding Scottish makers embodied in this
volume.
I am, by the kindness of John Smith, Esq., of Edinburgh, author of _Old
Scottish Clockmakers_, and of his publisher, William J. Hay, Esq., John
Knox's House, Edinburgh, enabled to produce names and dates of certain
Scottish makers not recorded elsewhere. In this connection my friend
William R. Miller, Esq., of Leith, has spared no time to help me to do
justice to Scottish makers, and I am especially grateful to him for his
kindly enthusiasm. He was there at the "chap o' the knok" when I asked
his help.
Westropp Dudley, Esq., of the National Museum, Dublin, has extended
to me his courtesy in enabling the inclusion of Irish makers coming
under his research. To Arthur Deane, Esq., of the Public Art Gallery
and Museum, Belfast, I am similarly obliged for data relative to old
Belfast clockmakers.
To the many friends who have during an extended period generously
supplemented my own studies by supplying me with data in regard to
provincial makers and other hitherto unelucidated matters, I wish to
offer my cordial thanks.
To my readers in general, whether they be collectors of old English
china or earthenware, of furniture, or of prints, or of old silver,
I desire to record my appreciation of their kindness in regard to my
volumes on these subjects. I have honestly endeavoured to treat each
sub-head concerning the evolution of design in the English home with
sane reasoning, and I trust with ripe judgment. I have assiduously
collected facts and studiously attempted to marshal them, each by each,
according to relative value. Popular my volumes may be, but it is my
hope that they may contribute something of permanent value to the
subjects with which they deal.
ARTHUR HAYDEN.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 11
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 21
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY NOTE 27
Time and its measurement--Day and night--Early mechanism--The
domestic clock--The personal clock--Rapid phases of
invention--The dawn of science--The great English masters of
clockmaking--The several branches of a great art--What to value
and what to collect--Hints for beginners
CHAPTER II
THE BRASS LANTERN CLOCK 45
The domestic clock--Its use as a bracket or wall
clock--Seventeenth-century types--Continuance of manufacture in
provinces--Their appeal to the collector
CHAPTER III
THE LONG-CASE CLOCK--THE PERIOD OF VENEER
AND MARQUETRY 67
What is veneer?--What is marquetry?--The use of veneer and
marquetry on long-case clocks--No common origin of design--_Le
style réfugié_--Derivative nature of marquetry clock-cases--The
wall-paper period--The incongruities of marquetry
CHAPTER IV
THE LONG-CASE CLOCK--THE PERIOD OF LACQUER 105
What is lac?--Its early introduction into this country--"The
Chinese taste"--Colour _versus_ form--Peculiarities of the
lacquered clock-case--The English school--English amateur
imitators--Painted furniture not lacquered work--The inn clock
CHAPTER V
THE LONG-CASE CLOCK--THE GEORGIAN PERIOD 131
The stability of the "grandfather" clock--The burr-walnut
period--Thomas Chippendale--The mahogany period--Innovations of
form--The Sheraton style--Marquetry again employed in decoration
CHAPTER VI
THE EVOLUTION OF THE LONG-CASE CLOCK 153
Its inception--Its Dutch origin--The changing forms of the
hood, the waist, and the base--The dial and its character--The
ornamentation of the spandrel--The evolution of the hands
CHAPTER VII
THE BRACKET CLOCK 179
The term "bracket clock" a misnomer--The great series of English
table or mantel clocks--The evolution of styles--Their competition
with French elaboration
CHAPTER VIII
PROVINCIAL CLOCKS 211
Their character--Names of clockmakers found on clocks in the
provinces--The North of England: Newcastle-upon-Tyne--Yorkshire
clockmakers: Halifax and the district--Liverpool and
the district--The Midlands--The Home Counties--The West
Country--Miscellaneous makers
CHAPTER IX
SCOTTISH AND IRISH CLOCKS 255
David Ramsay, Clockmaker Extraordinary to James I--Some
early "knokmakers"--List of eighteenth-century Scottish
makers--Character of Scottish clocks--Irish clockmakers: Dublin,
Belfast, Cork--List of Irish clockmakers
CHAPTER X
A FEW NOTES ON WATCHES 281
The age of Elizabeth--Early Stuart watches--Cromwellian
period--Watches of the Restoration--The William and Mary
watch--Eighteenth-century watches--Pinchbeck and the toy
period--Battersea enamel and shagreen
INDEX 295
ILLUSTRATIONS
BRASS LANTERN CLOCK BY JOHN BUSHMAN, 1680 _Frontispiece_
CHAPTER II.--THE BRASS LANTERN CLOCK PAGE
Ship's Lantern of Silver (Danish) 47
Early Lantern Clock by Bartholomew Newsam 47
Seventeenth-century Brass Clocks, showing pendulum at front
and at back 51
Brass Lantern Clock by Daniel Quare, 1660 55
" " " with two hands and anchor pendulum 55
" " " with long pendulum, chains and weights 57
" " " by Thomas Tompion (1671-1713) 61
CHAPTER III.--THE LONG-CASE CLOCK--THE PERIOD OF VENEER AND
MARQUETRY
Long-case Clock. Maker, Jas. Leicester 75
" " " by J. Windmills, _c._ 1705 77
" " " enlargement of dial 77
" " " by Henry Harper (1690-5) 81
" " " by Martin (London), 1710 85
" " " in marquetry, "all over" style 87
Chest of Drawers (William and Mary period), showing use
of marquetry clock panel 93-5
CHAPTER IV.--THE LONG-CASE CLOCK--THE PERIOD OF
LACQUER
Long-case Clock by Joseph Dudds (1766-82) 115
" " " by Kenneth Maclennan (1760-80) 117
Inn Clock by John Grant (Fleet Street), _c._ 1785 125
Chapter V.--The Long-case Clock--the Georgian Period
Long-case Clock by Henderson, _c._ 1770 133
" " " by Thomas Wagstaff, _c._ 1780 137
" " " by Stephen Rimbault, case by Robert
Adam, _c._ 1775 139
Musical Long-case Clock (top portion) 143
Long-case Clock by James Hatton (1800-12) 145
Regulator Long-case Clock by Robert Molyneux & Sons (1825) 149
Enlargement of dial 149
CHAPTER VI.--THE EVOLUTION OF THE LONG-CASE CLOCK
Brass Dial by Henry Massy, _c._ 1680 159
" " by John Draper, _c._ 1703 159
Enlargements of Dials by John Bushman and Henry Massy 163
English Wood-carving, Cherub's Head (seventeenth century) 167
Brass Spandrel from Clock, Henry Massy (1680) 167
Stretcher of William and Mary Chair (detail) 171
Brass Spandrel of Dial of Clock 171
CHAPTER VII.--THE BRACKET CLOCK
Bracket Clocks by:--
Sam Watson (Coventry), 1687. Joseph Knibb (Oxon), 1690 181
Thomas Loomes (London), 1700. Thomas Johnson (London), 1730 183
John Page (Ipswich), 1740. Godfrey Poy (London), 1745 187
Johnson (London), 1760. Thomas Hill (London), 1760 189
American Clock by Savin & Dyer (Boston), 1780-1800 193
Staffordshire Copper Lustre Ware Vase, with painted Clock Dial 195
Bracket Clocks by:--
Alexander Cumming (London), 1770. Anonymous, 1800 199
Barraud (London), 1805. Strowbridge (Dawlish) 201
Biddell (London), 1800. Anonymous (1800-15) 205
Ebony Table Clock, decorated with Wedgwood Medallions 207
CHAPTER VIII.--PROVINCIAL CLOCKS
Copper Token, Leeds Halfpenny, 1793 218
Long-case Clock by Gilbert Chippindale (Halifax) 219
" " " enlargement of hood 219
" " " by John Weatherilt (Liverpool) (1780-85) 221
" " " by Thurston Lassell (Liverpool), 1745 225
" " " by Henry Higginbotham (Macclesfield) 227
" " " by Heywood (Northwich), 1790 231
" " " by Thomas Wall (Birmingham), _c._ 1795 233
Copper Token, Joseph Knibb, Clockmaker in Oxon 236
Long-case Clock by Joseph Knibb (Oxon), _c._ 1690 237
" " " Georgian, Spanish mahogany, by Cockey
(Warminster) 239
Brass Dial of Welsh Clock by Shenkyn Shon (Pontnedd Fechan), 1714 243
Iron Dial of Sussex Clock by Beeching (Ashburnham) 243
Long-case Clock, with oval dial, by Marston (Salop), 1761 245
Dials of Clocks by Marston (Salop) and Thomas Wall (Birmingham) 249
CHAPTER IX.--SCOTTISH AND IRISH CLOCKS
Brass Lantern Clock by Humphry Mills (Edinburgh), 1670 259
" " " do. showing movement 259
Long-case Clock by Patrick Gordon (Edinburgh), 1705-15 263
Dial of Long Pendulum Clock by Jos. Gibson (Ecclefechan),
_c._ 1750 267
" " " " enlargement, showing maker's name 267
Wall Clock, decorated in marquetry, by George Graydon
(Dublin), _c._ 1796 269
Musical Clock by George Aicken (Cork), 1770-95 273
Regulator Clock, mahogany case, by Sharp (Dublin) 275
CHAPTER X.--A FEW NOTES ON WATCHES
Old English Watches (Elizabethan, James I, Cromwellian,
and Charles II) 283
" " (eighteenth-century examples) 287
Calendar Watch (seventeenth century) by Thomas Chamberlaine
de Chelmisforde 291
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Time and its measurement--Day and night--Early mechanism--The
domestic clock--The personal clock--Rapid phases of invention--The
dawn of science--The great English masters of clockmaking--The
several branches of a great art--What to value and what to
collect--Hints for beginners.
The dictionary definition of "clock" is interesting. _Clock._--A
machine for measuring time, marking the time by the position of its
hands upon the dial-plate, or by the striking of a hammer on a bell.
Probably from old French or from Low Latin, _cloca_, _clocca_, a bell.
Dutch, _klok_. German, _glocke_, a bell.
This is exact as far as it goes, but the thought seizes one, how did
it come about that man attempted to measure time? He saw the sunrise
and he watched the fading sunset till "Hesperus with the host of
heaven came," and the night melted again into the dawn. Nature marked
definitely the hours of light and hours of darkness. That was a law
over which he had no control. Similarly he watched the seasons--the
spring, the summer, the autumn, and the winter; this gave him the
annual calendar. It becomes a matter of curious speculation how it came
to pass that man divided the year into twelve months, and how he came
to give a name to each day, and to determine seven as forming a week.
Similarly one is curiously puzzled as to why he divided day and night
into twenty-four parts, calling them hours.
These speculations lead us farther afield than the scope of this
volume. An examination of Babylonian and Greek measurements of time
is too abstruse to be included in a volume of this nature. Nor is it
necessary, however interesting such may be, to record the astronomical
observations at Bagdad of Ahmed ibn Abdullah.
We must commence with the known data that the earth revolves on its
axis in twenty-four hours, or, to be more exact, in 23 hours 56 minutes
4 seconds. Astronomical clocks recording with scientific exactitude
this phenomenon are on a plane apart, as are chronometers used by
mariners. The astronomer uses a clock with numbers on its dial plate up
to twenty-four; the common clock has only twelve hour numerals.
To come straight to modernity, it must be recognized that the
measurement of time scientifically and the measurement of time
according to civil law are two different things.
The mean Solar day used in the ordinary reckoning of time, by most
modern nations, begins at midnight. Its hours are numbered in two
series from 1 to 12--the first series, called A.M. (_ante meridian_),
before midday, and the second series, P.M. (_post meridian_), after
midday. This is a clumsy arrangement and leads to confusion. The
leading railways of the world are beginning to use the series of
twenty-four.
Let it be granted that the day consists of twenty-four hours, which is
the apparent Solar day; the starting-point was not always the same.
The Babylonians began their day at sunrise, the Athenians and Jews at
sunset, the ancient Egyptians and Romans at midnight.
In passing, it should be noted that the day is measured astronomically
by recording the period of the revolution of the earth on its axis,
determined by the interval of time between two successive transits of
the sun, the moon, or a fixed star over the same meridian.
The Solar day is exactly 24 hours, the Lunar day is 24 hours 50
minutes, and the Sidereal day is 23 hours 56 minutes.
Apparent Solar Time is shown by the sundial, and therefore depends upon
the motion of the sun. Mean Solar Time is shown by a correct clock.
The difference between Mean Time and Apparent Time, that is, between
the time shown by the clock and the sundial, is called the Equation of
Time, and in the _Nautical Almanack_, a Government publication, there
are tables showing these differences.
=Day and Night.=--Obviously the hours of darkness offered a greater
problem to the horologist than the hours of light. His sundial was of
no use at night and of little use on cloudy days. The hour-glass was
not a piece of mechanism a man would wish to employ to record the night
watches. Some other self-acting mechanism had to be devised.
The interval between sunset and sunset, or sunrise and sunrise, or
noon and noon, was divided by the Babylonians, who had a love for the
duodenary system, into twenty-four hours. It is curious to read that
"until the eighteenth century in England the hour was commonly reckoned
as the twelfth part of the time between sunrise and sunset, or between
sunset and sunrise, and hence was of varying durations" (_Webster's New
International Dictionary_, 1914).
The hour was further divided, also by the Babylonians, into periods of
sixty minutes. It was the Babylonians who first divided the circle into
360 degrees, and Ptolemy followed this division.
The dial of a clock was at first termed the _hour-plate_, as only hours
were engraved upon it and only one hand was employed. Later, another
hand was added, the minute hand, which travelled a complete circuit
while the hour hand was travelling between two hour numerals. Later,
again, a new sub-dial was added, and a seconds hand recorded the sixty
seconds which made the minute. The term "second" was at first called
"second-minute," denoting that it was the second division of an hour by
sixty. The learned John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, that extraordinary
old savant, writes in 1650: "Four flames of an equal magnitude will
be kept alive the space of sixteen _second-minutes_, though one of
these flames alone, in the same vessel, will not last at most above
twenty-five or thirty seconds."
These dry facts may serve to whet the curiosity of the student in
regard to the measurement of time and its origin. They add a piquancy
to the clock dial as we now know it. Scientific it is, as one of man's
most exact recorders of natural phenomena. That an exact timekeeper
should be found in the pocket of every schoolboy would seem an
astounding miracle to our ancestors two hundred years ago, or even less
than a hundred years ago:
'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own,
writes Pope in his _Essay on Criticism_ in 1725.
This is a damning indictment of the accuracy of watches in the early
eighteenth century, but Dickens in _Dombey and Son_ suggests equally
faulty mechanism not in true accord with the mean solar day:
"Wal'r ... a parting gift, my lad. Put it back half an hour every
morning, and about another quarter towards the arternoon, and it's a
watch that'll do you credit."
That the civil day has taken precedence of the solar day is shown by
the recent legislation in regard to Summer Time. "The Sabbath was made
for man and not man for the Sabbath," may be applied to the clock dial.
By an Act of Parliament, in spite of science and the earth's revolution
on its axis, the hands straightway mean something else. It is well that
modern clocks have no wise saws and mottoes telling of the unalterable
hand of Time; "Old Time, the clock-setter, that bald sexton, Time," as
Shakespeare says in _King John_.
=Early Mechanism.=--The problem for the old clockmakers who wished
to supplant the primitive measurement of time by candle, by the
hour-glass, and later by the sundial, was to produce a piece of
mechanism which would in twenty-four hours, the prescribed period of
day and night, indicate the flight of time hour by hour.
In rapid survey we cannot pause to enter into details. The first clocks
indicated the hour alone by a hand attached to the axis of a wheel. In
the twelfth century a new mechanism was added to strike a bell with a
hammer, showing the hours indicated by the hand. At first the motive
power was a weight acting upon toothed wheels. In the fifteenth century
a spiral spring placed in a barrel replaced the weight attached to a
string as the motive power. This led to portable clocks of smaller
dimensions being possible.
The sixteenth century is remarkable for the great advance by Italian,
by Nuremberg, and by Augsburg clockmakers. Striking and alarum clocks,
and intricate mechanism showing phases of the moon, the year, the day
of the month, and the festivals of the Church, were produced. In the
sixteenth century portable clocks received further attention in regard
to minute mechanism, resulting in what we now know as the watch. The
moment this point was reached, ornamentation of a rich and elaborate
character was applied to such objects of art, then only in the
possession of princes and nobles and the richest classes of society.
In the middle of the seventeenth century Huygens, the celebrated Dutch
astronomer and mathematician, brought great modification in the art of
clockmaking by applying the pendulum to clocks in order to regulate the
movement, "and adapting, some years later, to the balance of watches a
spring, which produced upon this balance the same effect as that of the
weight upon the pendulum" (Labarte, _Arts of the Middle Ages_).
In old clocks there is a verge escapement with a cross-bar balanced by
weights. This was in the top portion of the clock.
When the pendulum was introduced it was first placed in front of the
clock and swung backwards and forwards across the face of the dial,
being only some six inches in length, and more frequently it is found
at the back of the clock, outside the case. See illustration (p. 51) of
examples.
As it was easy safely to convert the old form of balance into pendulum
form, with hanging weight or weights, this was frequently done. So
frequently, in fact, that very few of the old balance movements remain.
See illustration (p. 57) of lantern clock with weights and pendulum.
With the advent of the "royal" or long pendulum, the domestic clock
came into being.
We now arrive at the first period of the English domestic clock, and
from this point a fairly definite record of styles and changes can be
made.
=The Domestic Clock.=--This may be said to be the clock in use in
a great house, apart from the cathedral or church clock, the turret
clock, or the more public clock common to the gaze of everybody.
The nobility employed, on the Continent and in this country, great
clockmakers to produce these new scientific timekeepers for use in
their private apartments. But there came another phase when the clock
visible to the dependent was supplanted by more delicate mechanism of
greater value and of richer ornamentation.
=The Personal Clock.=--This was the watch. It was carried on the
person. It was the gift of a lover to his mistress. It was a rich and
rare jewel of scientific construction, set in crystal, embellished with
enamel and other rich decoration. In a measure it supplanted the clock
and drove it on to a lower plane.
It demanded craftsmanship of the highest character to create these
masterpieces of horology, and the art has been continued in a separate
stream to that of clockmaking up to the present day. The watch is not
the small clock, nor is the clock the large watch. Whatever may have
been their common origin, each has developed on lines essentially
proper for the technique. As the clock has developed in mechanical
perfection, so the watch has similarly kept in parallel progress
towards the same ideal, that of the perfect timekeeper.
A long succession of mechanical inventions is attached to the clock,
and similarly the watch has demanded equal genius till both arrive at
modernity.
=The Dawn of Science.=--The mid-seventeenth century the post-Bacon
period, when Newton became President of the Royal Society, may be said
to be the dawn of science in this country. The Aristotelian method of
analysis and the practical experiment set men's minds into scientific
channels. The scientific clockmaker was the product of this period of
restless activity. Science was in leading-strings. Prince Rupert's
Drops, so familiar now, were a scientific wonder. Bishop Wilkins
and Evelyn, Locke and Dr. Harvey, were all, from different points,
attempting to unravel the secrets of nature. The Tudor Age had opened
the New World; the next century was left to discover the untravelled
paths of science and mechanism. Invention was being suckled by
Curiosity. Invention only came to manhood in the nineteenth century.
=The Great English Masters of Clockmaking.=--There is the mythical
claim for Richard Harris, who is said to have invented the first
pendulum clock in Europe, fixed in the turret of St. Paul's, Covent
Garden, in 1640 or earlier. The Huygens pendulum was hung by a silken
cord, and the arc described by the bob or weight at its end was a
segment of a circle. Dr. Hooke invented the thin, flexible steel
support of the pendulum, producing more scientific accuracy. In 1658
he invented the _anchor escapement_, which, together with his spring
to the pendulum, is still used, although the "dead-beat" escapement
invented by George Graham has supplanted the "anchor" in timekeepers
requiring greater exactitude.
In regard to Robert Hooke and his claim to being the inventor of the
balance spring for watches, an invention claimed by Christopher Huygens
de Zulichem, there is an acrimonious dispute and lengthy correspondence
thereon. The Royal Society had published in their _Philosophical
Transactions_ for March 25th, 1675, the discovery of Huygens, who
visited England in 1661 and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. Dr.
Hooke protested. It appears that one of the "ballance double watches"
was presented to Charles II and was inscribed "Robert Hooke _inven._
1658. T. Tompion _fecit_ 1675." There is the record that George Graham
declared that he "had heard Tompion say he was employed three months
that year by Mr. Hooke in making some parts of these watches before
he let him know for what use they were designed, and that Tompion was
used to say he thought the first invention of them was owing to Mr.
Hooke."[1]
To come to the great masters of the art of English clockmaking. In
the transactions of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers it is
recorded that "in July 1704 it was by the Master reported that certain
persons at Amsterdam are in the habit of putting the names of Tompion,
Windmills, Quare, Cabrier, Lamb, and other well-known makers on their
works and selling them as English."[2] A committee was appointed to put
an end to such abuses.
[1] _Life of Robert Hooke_, by R. Waller, 1705. _Biographica
Britannica._
[2] _Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers of the City
of London_, by Samuel Elliott Atkins and Henry Overall, F.S.A., 1881
(_British Museum Library_, 10349 _gg._ 11).
Here then we have five of the leading English clockmakers in 1704, to
which we can add George Graham, the inventor of the "orrery," named
after his patron, Robert Boyle, Earl of Cork and Orrery, and to make
the number up to twenty-five we add the following. These men are in the
first flight. Ahasuerus Fromanteel (and the family of Fromanteel, of
Dutch origin), the first to introduce the pendulum into England; Edward
East; Joseph Knibb, father and son; William Dutton, Matthew and Thomas
Dutton, John Ebsworth, John Harrison, J. Grant, Stephen Rimbault,
Thomas Earnshaw, John Arnold, Thomas Mudge, Christopher Pinchbeck,
William Tomlinson, Justin Vulliamy, and Benjamin and Benjamin Lewis
Vulliamy.
In _Old Clocks and Watches and their Makers_, by the late F. J.
Britten, there is a list of some ten thousand names of clockmakers, so
that examples coming in the possession of collectors can readily be
checked by this list. But the fact that a maker's name is not in this
directory does not exclude him from recognition as a master, though
possibly he may not be one of the great masters.
=The Several Branches of a Great Art.=--The timekeeper--whether it be
the scientific astronomical clock, or the chronometer used by mariners,
or the modern watch, minute in size but recording time with accuracy,
or the bracket or table clock, or the long-case clock--has proceeded
on parallel lines of development. These types represent the several
branches of the great art of clockmaking.
Clockmakers and watchmakers very soon specialized when the correct
standard had been reached, and further inventions effected economy in
mechanism rather than drastic changes in principle making for further
exactitude. Specialization may be said to have undone clockmaking. We
realize that the clockmaker could not cast the brass spandrel ornaments
and chase them, or engrave the dial. We do not expect him to, nor did
he, lay the marquetry, or become a lacquer varnisher in the cases. We
cannot call upon him to cast the bell in the chiming movement, or to
make the catgut which is wound around the drum carrying the weights.
Nor was he an expert in metal design to pierce the hands and employ
delicate ornament in so doing. Perhaps we may forgive him employing
a special trade to supply him with delicate springs. But the factory
system of the middle nineteenth century began to eat into the vitals of
clockmaking in this country as a scientific craft. Makers of wheels,
makers of chains, makers of every conceivable part of the movement
sprang into being. No one of whom was a clockmaker, and no unit of any
such industry could put a clock together. The clockmaker, and even
then there is something personal yet remaining, became an assembler
of component parts. He certainly understood the completed whole and
made the wheels move and the hands record exact and perfect time. That
is something, and it is a very great thing too. But how shorn of his
former glory is the clockmaker in these conditions!
In this volume we deal with the collecting period, which is the stage
prior to this, but it is possible to look ahead as well as backward.
Factory-made clocks will be made, perfect timekeepers without doubt.
But there is still the great possibility that the clockmaker may seize
his own and wrest the laurels from the impersonal syndicate. To him who
can add personality to a clock--that something which parts put together
with mechanical precision lack--there awaits a glorious heritage. The
soul of the living clock must echo the soul of its human maker. The old
masters have left to posterity living organisms which will not die.
It rests with the public to say whether they prefer the gramophone
to the singer, the piano-player to the accomplished pianist. If the
clock of tomorrow is to be a mere soulless machine, the demand will be
met. But if it is to revert to that higher plane of the old masters of
clockmaking, it is for those who love beauty and truth to make their
desires imperative. For the moment, therefore, the study of the old and
the perfect claims the loving attention of the collector who sees new
lamps, like those which the magician in Aladdin's palace proffered for
sale, in place of old.
=What to Value and what to Collect.=--The appreciation of old clocks is
a natural gift. To one his mezzotints, to another his Chelsea china,
to another his old silver plate. But to all lovers of fine furniture
the English clock appeals sympathetically. It has a twofold claim to
recognition. It is, if it be a fine old English clock by an English
maker, a reliable piece of mechanism as a timekeeper. It is in certain
periods representative, in its marquetry or lacquered case, of styles
of decoration and design now only equalled by copyists. If it is by
one of the leading English clockmakers its movements are unequalled.
It stands as a monument to a great scientific craftsmanship now almost
extinct. The great English clockmakers of the first flight "were not of
an age but for all time."
Roughly speaking, the first twenty-five years of the eighteenth century
and the first thirty-five years of the nineteenth century represent
two periods when the clockmaker was doing splendid work. The clocks of
the intervening period are of value as representing work of extreme
carefulness, and are of course worthy of the attention and admiration
of the collector.
In the first period a crowd of skilled scientific clockmakers followed
each other in rapid succession and brought the art of horology to
perfection. During this first period the clock cases and the clock
dials came under artistic impulses not since equalled. It therefore
follows that for these two reasons the clocks of the first period are
most highly appreciated and are of great value.
The second period, that is, the first thirty-five years of the
nineteenth century, represents an era of established and sound
technique, exhibiting craftsmanship of a high order struggling for
supremacy and recognition at a time when factory inventions and
factory-made substitutes commenced to dominate not only the art of the
clockmaker but other personal crafts. During this time the case and
the dial cannot be said to possess the high artistic qualities found
in the earlier period. Art was beginning to sink into the Slough of
Despond which for half a century characterized most European arts, both
fine and applied.
=Hints for Beginners.=--To set out to buy an old clock is for the tyro
like setting out to buy a horse. In the latter case the teeth may
be filed and the hoofs pared to give a simulation of youth to which
possibly the beast could not lay claim. In the former, added touches
would counterfeit antiquity: here a pair of apparently old hands, there
an antiquated-looking dial, and an enshrining case of no particular
period, but seeming to bear Time's own impress of age, till one is
inclined to say, to quote the _Merchant of Venice_: "I never knew so
young a body with so old a head."
The following chapters will indicate the outline of a complex and
intricate subject. The case, the dial, the hands, all have to be
studied with no little skill in comparison and deduction in regard to
errors in clumsy repairers or unskilled restorers, who with vandal
hands have destroyed the balance of fine work and introduced component
parts which are harlequin to the trained collector's eye. This much
for the _visible_. Then there is the movement, that is, the mechanism
which makes the clock a clock. This is unseen by the average snapper-up
of old clocks, or when seen not understood. There are those collectors
who stop short in their requirements. A clock is an ornament to a
well appointed home, in the hall, in the smoking-room, or in the
dining-room. They are unconcerned as to whether it is a timekeeper or
a monument, "long to be patient and silent to wait like a ghost that is
speechless." One longs to call aloud to such an encumbrance with its
dead wheels and its atrophied hands: "Watchman! What of the night?"
It is a servant that serves no longer. It is like a poor relation
thrusting his company upon his fellow-guests with dumb tongue and a
solemn demeanour telling of former glories.
But the sane modern collector wants an old clock not because it is old,
but because he rightly has assumed that there are certain qualities of
the old clockmaker's art which are not to be found in later periods.
Wise in his generation, he places himself not in the hands of a dealer
who has sold a thousand clocks, but in the hands of a practical
clockmaker who has made one. A trained man having a knowledge of old
movements, and to whom they are something more than inanimate objects,
will advise the collector. To such a man a clock is something with a
soul. To him one goes who will set the silent wheels moving and endow
the dead clockmaker's heritage with pulsating life.
But--the word of warning cannot be too strongly sounded to all
possessors of old clocks. Every year fine examples of old work are
ruined for ever by ignorant repairers and restorers. In their little
day they have destroyed movements and parts which can never be
replaced. Of all arts, the art of the clockmaker has suffered most at
the hands of the modern destroyer of work he does not understand.
CHAPTER II
THE BRASS LANTERN CLOCK
The domestic clock--Its use as a bracket or wall
clock--Seventeenth-century types--Continuance of manufacture in
provinces--Their appeal to the collector.
The form of the lantern clock is one that appeals to the artist. We
love the candelabrum with candles, with its finely, fashioned brass
forms, Dutch and English. It adds a grace to the interiors of the old
masters of the Low Countries. Nobody is especially interested in the
gas bracket or the paraffin lamp. There is the picture of _The Doctor_
by Luke Fildes, but here the lamp only adds to the poverty and anguish
of the scene. It is realistic and had to be there, and it makes a great
factor in the lighting. But the chandelier with candles is the most
beloved by the artist who inclines to the primitive, as we all do.
The electric light must come into art and it does. The lift and the
telephone are facts, but they are difficult, naked and unashamed as
they are, to clothe with æsthetic drapery. The cubist and the modern
pseudo-scientific realist revel in incongruities repellent to art.
They seize these as their own, and make them in their presentation more
repellent.
Happily the clock has not received the attention of the modern
sensation-monger. We are left with the heritage of the past
undisturbed. He may gibe at the paint and canvas of old masters, he may
deride the grace of the Greek in sculpture, but the simple mechanism of
the clock symbolizing "the inaudible and noiseless foot of Time" mocks
the charlatan of a little day, with oblivion tracking his scurrying
heels.
The name of lantern clock may puzzle the modern collector, but its
shape followed the lantern of the period, and, like the lantern, it
was made to hang on the wall. We illustrate (p. 47) a silver ship's
lantern of the period of Christian IV of Denmark, of the late sixteenth
century, with the King's monogram. It was doubtless used in the
expedition round the North Cape. It is in the collection at Rosenborg
Castle at Copenhagen. This lantern shape is found in German clocks of
the period, and in English seventeenth-century clocks the same shape is
continued. A fine example by Bartholomew Newsam is illustrated (p. 47),
showing the early type conforming to the lantern design.
Not only the form but the usage determined the name. The lantern had
spikes or metal hooks to hang upon. The clock similarly was affixed to
a wall, and we know it as a bracket clock, because, whether on a wall
or on a bracket, it had chains and weights suspended beneath it, as it
was not in its early form capable of being placed on a table.
[Illustration: SHIP'S LANTERN OF SILVER.
Used by Christian IV of Denmark on his voyage round the North Cape.
(_At Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen._)]
[Illustration: EARLY LANTERN CLOCK.
By Bartholomew Newsam (1570-90).
(_At British Museum. Reproduced by permission._)]
We think lovingly of it as belonging to a past that is something more
than tapestry figures moving in a misty background. To watch the
revolving pinions of a Stuart clock is to hear the echoes of the past
reverberate. It requires no gramophone to reproduce dead voices, nor
a cinema picture to recall bygone incidents and happenings. One can
listen to the same monotone calling forth the departure of the seconds
that awakened George Herbert from a reverie and beat rhythmically
to his carefully wrought verse. The same hand pointed to midnight
that beckoned Lovelace from his revels. We are reminded of Justice
Shallow's "we have heard the chimes at midnight,"--an old man's boast
of rollicking gaiety. The trite engraved words _Tempus fugit_ drew a
thousand sweet sounds from golden-mouthed Herrick, who sang of fading
roses and counselled maids "with Daffodils and Daisies crowned" to
make the most of their charms. _Vanitas vanitatum_, all is vanity; the
sadness of it all, the flying hours that no man can recall, the long
slow shadow that creeps across the grass--this is the message of the
poets; and when they pause for a moment from the dance in the sunlight
to think of time, it is Time the ancient reaper with the scythe, who
cuts down the young flowers ruthlessly with the fateful sweep of his
blade.
=Its Use as a Bracket or Wall Clock.=--Old engravings of clocks and
of clockmakers' workshops show clocks on the wall with the weights
suspended beneath the brass case. Such a clock usually went for thirty
hours. That is, it was usual to wind it by pulling up the chains once a
day, a method retained, in long-case clocks of thirty-hour duration, by
provincial makers a couple of centuries later in England.
It is obvious that these clocks stand apart from the era of the
spring as a driving force, being weight-driven, and are before the
introduction of the pendulum as a regulator of the mechanism impelled
by the weights.
As timekeepers they never can bear comparison with the later type with
the long pendulum. They stand as examples of early clockmaking, with
fine brass dials, with artistic appearance, simple and unpretentious,
but lacking the real scientific application of further developed
principles of a succeeding period.
A clock that could only be used as a bracket clock or a wall clock with
weights beneath hardly filled the requirements of an age when domestic
furniture demanded luxury and exquisite taste. The personal clock--that
is, the watch--offered more possibilities.
The advent of the pendulum came just at a time when the art of the
clockmaker required the necessary impetus to carry him to newer and
more extended fields. The invention revolutionized the domestic clock.
As to the clocks used by the wealthy classes in England at the year
1685, one recalls the death-bed scene of Charles II as described by
Macaulay:
[Illustration: SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BRASS CLOCK.
With pendulum in front of dial.
(_At British Museum. Reproduced by permission._)]
[Illustration: SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BRASS CLOCK.
With pendulum behind back plate of clock.]
"The morning light began to peep through the windows of Whitehall; and
Charles desired the attendants to pull aside the curtains, that he
might have one more look at the day. He remarked that it was time to
wind up a clock that stood near his bed. These little circumstances
were long remembered, because they proved beyond dispute that, when
he declared himself a Roman Catholic, he was in full possession of
his faculties. He apologized to those who had stood round him all
night for the trouble which he caused. He had been, he said, a most
unconscionable time dying; but he hoped that they would excuse it. This
was the last glimpse of that exquisite urbanity so often found potent
to charm away the resentment of a justly incensed nation. Soon after
dawn the speech of the dying man failed."
It was Bacon who wrote, a century before: "If a man be in sickness or
pain, the time will seem longer without a clock or hour-glass than with
it."
The question arises as to what particular kind of clock was at the
bedside of Charles II that he should notice that it required winding.
It may have been usual to wind it at that particular time every
morning, being, as it undoubtedly was, a thirty-hour clock conveniently
wound the same time every day. But it is more probable that the King
saw that it wanted winding by the position of the weights.
=Seventeenth-century Types.=--The idea of the pendulum had been in
men's minds since the days of Leonardo da Vinci, but Christopher
Huygens, the Dutch astronomer and mechanician, applied it to the
clock. At first it was placed in front of the dial and swung from
the top. The illustration we give (p. 51) shows an early clock with
this device. The pendulum was next placed at the back (see adjacent
illustration, p. 51), and later inside the clock.
We illustrate several types of the lantern clock showing its changing
form from a slender and graceful clock, with the dial in correct
proportion, to the later type, when the dial projected beyond the body
of the clock. When the bell was placed at the top and ornamented by
a brass terminal, the name applied to the clock was "birdcage," and
pictures by the old Dutch masters show birdcages of this shape hanging
in ladies' boudoirs.
It will be observed that as a rule the dials are circular, consisting
of the hour plate without the four spandrels. But we illustrate an
example of a square dial by John Bushman, London, about 1680, with
crown and verge escapement, with short pendulum, and alarum with
striking and going trains run by same weight. It will be observed that
these clocks have only one hand--the hour hand. In the example above
mentioned (see Frontispiece), the dial has an inner circle showing
quarters of an hour. The hand, as illustrated, has passed one quarter
and half of the next; it is therefore about twenty-two and a half
minutes past three. There is also an alarum marked with arabic figures
one to twelve. (An enlargement of this dial is illustrated p. 163)
The other specimens we illustrate exhibit slightly varying
characteristics.
[Illustration: BRASS LANTERN CLOCK, WITH SINGLE HAND.
Thirty hours; striking, but no alarum. With chains and weights beneath;
short pendulum at back.
Date, about 1660. Maker, Daniel Quare (London).]
[Illustration: BRASS LANTERN CLOCK, WITH TWO HANDS.
Thirty hours; striking and alarum. Anchor pendulum with wings each side
and chains and weight below clock. Short pendulum at back.
Date, about 1670.]
[Illustration: BRASS LANTERN CLOCK.
Showing chains with weights and long pendulum.
Date, about 1700.
(_At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York._)]
The brass lantern clock illustrated (p. 55) has chains and weights. It
is a thirty-hour clock, with striking but no alarum movement. It has a
short pendulum behind the back plate.
The use of an anchor-shaped pendulum brought a winged screen into
fashion to conceal its movement. The example illustrated (p. 55) shows
this style. This also is a bracket clock with chains supporting the
weights.
But the bracket clock did not stop at this stage. On the introduction
of the long or seconds pendulum this new mechanism was embodied in
brass clocks, and the illustration (p. 57) of an example about 1700
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, shows this type. A fine
brass lantern clock by Thomas Tompion is at the British Museum, an
illustration of which is given (p. 61).
=Continuance of Manufacture in the Provinces.=--Long after the
long-case clock was in general use in London, the brass clock with
weights and pendulum was extensively made in the provinces. Examples
are found by local makers up to the early years of the nineteenth
century. In a measure this continuance of an obsolete form is parallel
with the village cabinet-maker's furniture. Generation after generation
produced oak chairs and settles in Stuart form, and when Chippendale
seized the world of fashion, it was not till long afterwards that
village craftsmen made chairs in the Chippendale manner--but in yew, in
beech, and in sycamore, never in mahogany. Even Sheraton's satinwood
elegance in delicate tapered legs found an echo in elm and beech. It
is such naïveté which is delightful to the collector, and in provincial
clocks he will find a study equally rewarded by extraordinary
anachronisms and singular adaptations within the compass of the local
maker.
For instance, the marquetry of the village carpenter is always a
hundred years behind the time. His engraving on dials is of the same
character as that on his local coffin-plates or his tombstones. His
painted dials often exhibit native touches difficult to equal.
=Their Appeal to Collectors.=--Anything that appeals to collectors,
whether it be Morland's colour prints or Wheatley's _Cries of London_,
old Sheffield plate, Stuart cane-back chairs or Sheraton tea-caddies,
pays the usual tribute which the antique pays to posterity. As
imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, a thousand replicas
start up to supply a demand. The man of taste says that such and such
a thing is unique in its art-appeal to him. The man of money seeks
to prove that it is not unique and buys as many uniques and antiques
as his distended banking account will allow. We find this applies to
lantern clocks. Birmingham has turned out thousands of these brass
clocks in replica of seventeenth-century styles. Sometimes as much as
ten pounds is asked for them, and sometimes it is found that an old
maker's name has been added to the dial. There is no particular harm
in any man having replicas of fine old objects of art in his house if
he likes the styles and cannot afford originals. But it is a pity that
any one should ever pay more than replica price for a copy. That is
foolishness, and outside the realm of collecting.
[Illustration: BRASS LANTERN CLOCK.
Maker, Thomas Tompion (1671-1713). Height 8-3/4 inches.
(_At British Museum. Reproduced by permission._)]
Perhaps it is a wise dispensation of Providence that the man of wealth
can possess the originals and that the poor man and the man of taste
must content himself with copies. It was Balzac who chalked up in his
garret, "Here is a Velasquez," "Here is an Andrea del Sarto." Lovers of
the real can impart to the modern replicas purchased for a few pounds
the spirit of the old examples. It is the same artistic impulse which
accepts the translation in lieu of the original. Through FitzGerald we
read Omar. Horatius Flaccus, who appeals to the esoteric with his _odi
profanum vulgus_, is filtered through a Western tongue. One is grateful
to see plaster casts in the British Museum of the Three Fates from the
Parthenon at Athens. Echoes suggest so much to those who have the inner
spirit to conjure up the original.
CHAPTER III
THE LONG-CASE CLOCK--THE PERIOD OF VENEER
AND MARQUETRY
What is veneer?--What is marquetry?--The use of veneer and
marquetry on long-case clocks--No common origin of design--Le
style réfugié--Derivative nature of marquetry clock-cases--The
wall-paper period--The incongruities of marquetry.
For some fifty years--that is, from about 1670, the date of the secret
treaty of Charles II with Louis XIV, to about the year 1720, the early
years of the reign of George I--there was a marked leaning towards
colour in furniture as distinct from form. The solid English oak of
early days and the later intricacies of walnut were dependent solely
on form, either in carving or in elaborate turning, as in the Charles
II and James II period, when the so-called "barley-sugar" pattern and
other elaborate "corkscrew" turned legs added grace and beauty to
furniture beginning to take its place beside the work of great European
craftsmen.
In flattering imitation of continental schools, but more particularly
the Dutch, English cabinet-makers commenced to inlay their furniture
with ivory and coloured woods, and designs embodying conventional birds
and flowers became of frequent use. A considerable amount of skill
was employed in adopting this new art, which necessitated the careful
laying of veneer. In comparison with the ordinary Dutch cabinet-work,
this derivative English furniture exhibits, in a measure, finished work
of a high degree in regard to the exactitude of cabinet-work which
surpassed the prototypes. The English craftsman was working in a new
medium, and he apparently was exceptionally careful in handling its
technique.
In the reign of William of Orange, as may be imagined, with his Dutch
retinue and the Dutch influences at Court, the style received a great
impetus and the country was flooded with Dutch art. This impress
of the House of Nassau is left upon Hampton Court, with its canal,
its avenues, and its formal gardens. What Charles II and his exiled
cavaliers brought in spirit from The Hague, William brought in reality
when he landed at Torbay in 1698.
It must be remembered that in 1685 and in the immediately succeeding
years, owing to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV,
fifty thousand Huguenot families fled from France to escape a horrible
fate at the hands of their Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen. In vain
the Archbishop of Canterbury directed the clergy not to dwell on the
sufferings of the French Protestants, and in spite of James II, whose
sympathies were with their persecutors, the sum of forty thousand
pounds was collected in the English churches and handed over to the
Chamber of London. This was a great sum in those days to be raised
thus voluntarily. Three years afterwards James ignominiously fled
to the Continent and a second Revolution ended the Stuart dynasty.
Thousands of skilled workmen settled in London. At Spitalfields they
erected silk-looms; they represented the best type of artist craftsmen,
silversmiths, woodworkers, glass-blowers, cabinet-makers, designers,
and other artistic industries. Their advent was an artistic asset to
this country. The Duke of Buckingham ten years earlier had procured
a number of expert glassworkers from Venice and had established the
manufacture of glass and mirrors at Vauxhall.
=What is Veneer?=--The art of veneering is of ancient origin. It has a
long record before it reaches what we now know as veneering. To make a
rapid survey we must commence with the art of inlay. This art may be in
metal upon metal, as in damascening; stone upon stone, as in _pietra
dura_; porcelain, terra-cotta, enamel, or coloured glass, as in mosaic
work; or wood upon wood, as in intarsia; which subsequently became
marquetry. The inlays in all these techniques are cut into cubes,
hexagons, triangles, or other forms, often of very minute size, to form
broad designs, as in marble pavements, or surfaces of great area such
as the dome of St. Mark's at Venice, the choicest home of mosaic work
in the world. From these grandeurs to the Tunbridge ware trinket-boxes
with their intricate patterns, or the nicely fitting lids of Scottish
snuff-boxes, is a far cry, but they embody the same principle.
Veneering may therefore be comprehensively described as overlaying or
inlaying one body with portions of another. A veneer may be plain,
without inlay or marquetry, such as a plain panel of mahogany affixed
or laid on to a body of oak or some other wood. But in practice it has
been so much used as a groundwork for the art of inlay and marquetry
that it is difficult to separate them.
There is a prevalent idea that veneer has a sinister meaning. The
comparison has been made between solid and veneer, as though the former
were true and the latter something false, parallel with the distinction
Pope made--
Worth makes the man, the want of it, the fellow;
The rest is all but leather or prunello.
There is every reason why such a notion should be held as true. It is
true of modern cabinet-work of the shoddy type, where pine is veneered
with mahogany and walnut and passed off as solid. But the collector
is dealing with a period when veneering was an art adopted for sound
decorative and technical reasons and not solely for purposes of gain.
The old craftsman found it impossible to make cabinets and other
pieces of furniture of rare wood, such as ebony, tulip-wood, rosewood,
satinwood, and others. It was not always workable in such fashion;
its weight was one factor against its employment in the solid. But
in introducing panels and fronts of these richly decorative woods
the cabinet-maker of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
brought colour into his work and employed the highest artistry. The
sound construction of these old veneered cabinets was before the days
of machinery; veneers or slices of the wood to be laid on were cut by
hand, and were one-eighth of an inch thick, hence their stability.
Nowadays sheets of veneer are saw-cut and knife-cut, and with modern
machinery the former vary from twelve to fifteen to the inch, and the
latter average about forty sheets to the inch, although sheets can be
cut, incredible as it may seem, of the thinness of a cigarette paper.
=What is Marquetry?=--Marquetry is the inlaying of wood into wood. We
have already seen that other inlays have their respective techniques
and names. But there is the question as to the application of the old
word "tarsia," which apparently in the early days included both wood
and metal inlays. "Intarsia" is the term applied to that particular
early type of marquetry which brought inlaying coloured woods to such
perfection in two great schools, the Italian and the German. By means
of woods, either of their natural colour or stained, woodworkers
produced pictures in wood. Great Italian masters drew for the Italian
school of artist craftsmen. Just as the dome of St. Mark's at Venice
shows the successive styles of mosaic work executed during several
centuries from Byzantine to Italian, so the choir stalls show the work
of the cloistered _intarsiatori_ at the cathedral at Siena, at the
cathedral and at S. Maria Novella, Florence, at Perugia, at Lucca, at
Pavia, at Genoa, and at Savona.
Small pieces of carefully selected wood were inserted into darker wood
panels to produce fanciful devices or pictures, with perspective and
even tone. This intricate art resembled that of the mosaic-worker,
whose more ambitious works have taken from fifteen to twenty years to
execute. Some of the tesseræ in this technique are hardly larger than a
pin's head. Day by day they were patiently laid on the cement to form
the design. Similarly in the old intarsia days the workers did not heed
time. They selected their delicate little pieces of coloured wood and
proceeded to lay their panels and stalls for posterity.
The German school of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attracted
considerable attention, at Nuremberg, at Augsburg, at Dresden, and at
Munich. In North Germany intarsia was principally employed on smaller
articles, such as cabinets, chairs, coffers, although Lübeck and Danzig
furnish fine examples in the panelling of the town-halls. In South
Germany, in closer touch with Italian influence, the practice was more
diverse; sideboards, doors, bedsteads, panelling, friezes, and even
gables to châteaus, received this ornamentation.
Augsburg and Nuremberg developed an industry and exported their
marquetry. This suggests the first attempt at duplication. Black on
white and white on black, male and female as they are termed in the
trade, or later, in France, Boulle and counter-Boulle, were exported.
The slicing of design and the manipulation of the knife, and later the
saw, came into operation to fret out the pattern. In its subsequent
development marquetry left the inlaying, piece by piece, and as tools
became more perfect easier methods were employed. Whether André
Boulle, in his _atelier_ under Louis XIV, invented the process or
whether he got it from Germany through Holland is immaterial to the
present argument. His brass and tortoiseshell marquetry set a fashion
to all succeeding craftsmen. He has given his name to his particular
style; though it has been "defamed by every charlatan and soiled with
all ignoble use" and corrupted to "Buhl," but there is no reason why
_Boulle_ should not stand, although Webster's Dictionary knows him not.
Practically, nowadays marquetry is the cutting of thin sheets of wood
which have been superimposed upon each other, and when taken apart,
after the desired pattern has been cut away, fit into each other to
produce the desired colour effect. For instance, a sheet of walnut,
dark brown, placed over a sheet of sycamore, light yellow, has a
pattern pasted on it in paper. The delicate fret-saw traces this
pattern and cuts through both light and dark woods. The result is that
the light-wood surface is left with a perforation ready to receive
the piece cut from its fellow, the dark wood, and _vice versa_. That
is just what the marquetry-worker does. He transposes the piece of
sycamore to the walnut surface and fits it in, showing a yellow design
on dark brown, and similarly the walnut piece, fitted in place or the
sycamore ground, shows a brown design on a yellow surface. This is only
a simple outline of the process, as more than two sheets are placed
together. In its intricacies it represents one of the most delicate and
highly skilled crafts in connection with cabinet-making. The adept at
jig-saw puzzles may draw a seemly parallel between his pastime and the
patient artistry of the artist-craftsman.
=The Use of Veneer and Marquetry.=--In its decoration and in its
form the long-case or "grandfather" clock is as Dutch as the tiles
of Haarlem. Derivative as is English art, the sharp line of a new
introduction is rarely so clearly defined as in the instance of the
late seventeenth-century long-case clock. As a long wooden case it was
itself an innovation. Being new, it was never at any previous time
English, and it started its history under Dutch auspices, as in similar
manner the pendulum was introduced into England by Fromanteel. There is
no mistaking its origin. It comes straight from the placid canals and
waterways, the prim and well-ordered farmsteads, or the richly loaded
burghers' houses of the Low Countries. It has become as thoroughly
English as the Keppels and the Bentincks.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
With fine marquetry decoration.
Maker, Jas. Leicester (Drury Lane). 1710.
Height, 8 ft. 2 in. Width, 1 ft. 7-1/2 in. Depth, 10 in.
(_By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq._)]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, J. Windmills (London).
Date, about 1705.
Decorated in marquetry.]
[Illustration: ENLARGEMENT OF DIAL.
Showing cherub's head with floriated design in spandrel and broken
frieze. Marquetry in hood indicates coarser style than in rest of clock.
(_By courtesy of H. Wingate, Esq., Rochester._)]
In regard to clock-cases, it is mostly found that the veneer has been
laid upon an oak body. Usually the main surface is of walnut, into
which the design has been inlaid by the use of other woods of suitable
colours. At first the marquetry was in reserves or panels, as
though the worker were warily picking his way and timidly mastering the
technique. At this period clock-cases were, on account of the small
space to be inlaid, very fit subjects for experiment. Doubtless some
of the more ambitious work of the early years of this half-century
(1670-1720) was actually produced by Dutch and also by French workmen
settled in this country, and doubtless the clock-cases were largely
imported. In either instance this would account for the early adoption
of small articles such as clock-cases, after which followed chairs
and tables, and finally larger pieces of furniture such as bureaus,
when the cabinet-maker was master of the new art of laying veneer and
marquetry, or when the public taste had advanced sufficiently to induce
him to embark on more elaborate work.
It is not easy to lay down any exact rules as to the priority of
certain styles of marquetry. Many of them overlap in regard to date.
It all depends on the point of view. Huguenot craftsmen or Dutch
marquetry-workers could, and possibly did, make in London many such an
example as the fine case with panels (illustrated p. 75) containing
the movement by James Leicester, in date 1710, or the other example,
in date about 1690 (illustrated p. 237), with the movement by Joseph
Knibb, of Oxford, placed in the chapter on provincial makers as
a glorious tribute to those great makers who worked outside the
metropolis. In this earlier case of the Knibb clock it will be seen
that there are only two panels, and they exhibit, in comparison with
the James Leicester clock, a finer sense of proportion in relation to
the surface to be decorated. It may not unreasonably be advanced, where
the nicety of balance is well sustained, that the maker set out to make
a clock-case with the dimensions fully before him as a marquetry-worker
and not merely as a mechanical layer of imported panels. There is the
suggestion in cut panels that they were not thought out in accord with
the English clock-case, with its hole showing the pendulum.
Of exceptional interest is the fine clock by J. Windmills. The
marquetry case of this clock has been untouched, and its condition,
as shown by the illustration (p. 77), helps to prove a point. It is
clear that the panel of marquetry was not intended by the craftsman
who laid it to have a hole to show the pendulum. The design shows the
disturbance caused by this unexpected innovation. The enlarged hood
shows the broken frieze, an accident frequently attending old examples.
But the frame in hood around glass has been laid in marquetry by a
coarser hand in an attempt to be in keeping with the panel of the door
in case below. The somewhat clumsy joinery of the door frame, shown
clearer in the enlargement, indicates the amalgamation of the English
case-maker and the more finished marquetry-panel worker.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Henry Harper (Cornhill). 1690-95.
Height, 8 ft. 6 in. Width, 1 ft. 7-1/2 in. Depth, 10 in.
(_In the possession of Mr. John Girdwood, Edinburgh._)]
Frequently cases offer curious obstacles to preconceived ideas. Take,
for example, the fine case with the movement by Henry Harper of the
period from 1690 to 1695 illustrated (p. 81). As far as it is possible
to determine, it would seem that this specimen of marquetry belongs
to a later period, certainly more advanced than the panel period.
With so fine a field of design to select from, no marquetry-worker
would take this design from a Persian carpet at the beginning of the
style. This case represents the highest Dutch feeling and technique as
assimilated in this country, and the carved brackets have a distinctly
Marot character. It stands as a superlative example of marquetry
decoration.
It sometimes happens that a clockmaker, as the differences in sizes
of many of these clocks are not great, found an earlier case ready to
his hand, or a client desired a particular style of decoration, and
he accordingly put his new clock of 1710 into a case twenty or thirty
years earlier. Or it may be that some marquetry-worker reproduced the
former style. Whichever may have happened we cannot say--these are
the conundrums left as a heritage to the collector, who now comes two
hundred years later.
The fine example of a clock by Martin, London (1710), illustrated (p.
85), is well balanced, and typifies the marquetry in an early period.
The turned pillar has not yet disappeared, and is reminiscent of the
fine Tompion cases with turned pillars. It exhibits the transitional
stage before marquetry entirely supplanted the older style. In this
specimen the marquetry is under fine artistic control.
In what for convenience of expression we term the "all-over" period the
marquetry-worker ran riot. Not only in colour, for he had to compete
with the richly coloured lacquered cases, but in form. But he had as a
craftsman learned the art of laying his imported marquetry sheets where
he willed. He was not deterred from rounded surfaces, and the cramped
pattern of the panel was discarded, to make way for the style where the
pattern, like chintz or wall-paper, conveniently repeated itself.
There is no mistaking such an example, splendid though it is, as
exemplifying this period illustrated (p. 87), for the quieter and more
reticent style of panel-work with design in due subjection.
The student will desire to take cognizance of country-made marquetry
cases. Marquetry was practised in England before this outburst
of colour and form on the clock-case. Occasionally settles and
buffets--very occasionally--had stringing in a thin pattern of black
and white intarsia work. Provincial makers are therefore a delight as
well as a confoundment to the collector. A cabinet-maker in Devonshire
or a would-be marquetry-worker in Cumberland may, between his
intervals of making the coffins for his deceased neighbours or turning
their wagon shafts, essay to try his hand at imitating the squire's
clock-case of fifty years' previous date. He usually puts a label to
his handiwork which renders it easily recognizable. There is no _style
réfugié_ about his craftsmanship. His design is crudely "chopped in,"
that is, the solid wood has been cut out to receive the pieces of the
design, usually, as found now, very badly glued, and severely handled
by time. This is interesting as showing 'prentice work--that is,
'prentice work coming many years after the finished art had been
established in this country. It is remarkable that no such apprentice
work appears in London-made examples. The conclusion to which one must
come is that there was no such apprenticeship. Foreign refugees made
the clock-cases or they were imported from Holland.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Martin (London). 1710.
Finely decorated in marquetry, with turned pillars in hood. Showing
transitional period.
(_In the possession of Mr. John Girdwood, Edinburgh._)]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Decorated in marquetry in the "all-over" style.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons._)]
=No Common Origin of Design.=--All art is derivative. It is not a crime
for the craftsman to assimilate the best of all the great artists who
have preceded him. This was the insanity of _L'Art Nouveau_. It wanted
to commence again at elementary principles and to use poor forms that
had long been discarded by great artificers. It wished us deliberately
to ignore the past. An anvil has arrived by a process of evolution
through long centuries of metal-workers, since man first smelted ore
and fashioned metal, to its present form. It would be idle to equip the
blacksmith with a square anvil.
From China to Japan, from India to Armenia, from Bagdad to Cairo,
from Alexandria to Venice, from Canton to Goa and thence to Lisbon,
backwards and forwards across the world's trade routes art impulses
have throbbed to the tune of the monsoons. Pulsating with life, they
carried, and still carry, Eastern ideas to the West, and Western
inventions to the East. Behind modernity and man's latest devices
somnolently lies the great dead past--China and the Far East, Persia
and Babylon, Egypt and Greece and Rome. Aztec gods and Ashanti gold
ornaments, Peruvian Inca clay vessels and Malayan idols, surprise and
bewilder the ethnologist with the similarity of rudimentary forms or
with the marvellously pure ornament that comes out of the so-conceived
dark corners of the earth to suggest older civilizations as artistic as
those of the modern world.
=Le Style Réfugié.=--The history of art is not hidden. Holbein and
Hollar and Vandyck, Lely and Kneller worked in this country. The number
of foreign artists and artist-craftsmen working in this country as
acclimatized or as "naturalized" was stupendous. The beautiful swags
and delicately carved woodwork embellishing so many English houses and
proudly held as heirlooms are by a Dutchman's hand--Grinling Gibbons.
The list could be extended. It is natural that the gold of England
should have a hypnotic attraction to artistic temperaments. It is the
law of supply and demand. Like bananas and pineapples, oranges and
dates, foreign talent comes to a great emporium.
The _style réfugié_ was something definite. It was a term employed
in Holland just at the time when a similar immigration was occurring
in this country. The French Protestant refugees fleeing from the
insane fury of Roman Catholic bigots naturally fled to Protestant
countries--to England, to Holland, and to Germany. It is admitted
on the Continent that these highly skilled artist craftsmen had
an influence on the art of the country of their adoption. It is
acknowledged as _le style réfugié_. In England, writers on furniture
have half-heartedly alluded to this influence, but it was very real.
Daniel Marot, a descendant from an eminent family of French artists,
a pupil of Lepautre, formerly at the Gobelins factory, and one of the
creators of the Louis Quatorze style, took refuge in Holland, where
William of Orange appointed him as Minister of Works. From The Hague
he followed his patron to England at the "Glorious Revolution." It was
his genius in design that made our William and Mary and Queen Anne
styles. At Hampton Court his personality predominates. Sir Christopher
Wren occupied himself with the architecture, but the decorations are
by Daniel Marot. Marot died in 1718. He stands in the forefront of the
exponents of _le style réfugié_, and behind him are hundreds of his
compatriots. It is idle to ignore this influence.
Chippendale owed more than most people imagine to Marot. _Le style
chinois_ is to be found, so to speak, in embryo, in Marot's design
books, and suggestions of it appear in some of his executed work.
The un-English marquetry became acclimatized, and later, as we shall
show, the equally un-English lac became a fashion.
=Derivative Nature of Marquetry Clock-cases.=--The laying of marquetry
as a craft is one thing, the conception of marquetry as a creative art
is another. We may admire the dexterity of the inlay but deplore the
design. At the Mortlake tapestry works Vandyck and Rubens made drawings
for the craftsmen. In England, whenever the craftsman has been allied
with the artist he has produced great results; whenever he has run
alone he has rapidly run downhill. Josiah Wedgwood had on the one
side Bentley the classical scholar, on the other Flaxman the artist
and modeller with a perfect continental training. Chippendale, great
craftsman that he was, would have been better advised to prune his
Chinese taste and discard his worthless Gothic style. An artistic brain
behind him would have saved him from such atrocities. Sheraton, more
the artist than the craftsman, made no such blunders.
Evidently the making of clock-cases became an industry. Personally
we incline to the belief that seventy-five per cent. of them were of
foreign manufacture, either in Holland and imported here, or made by
Dutch immigrants or French refugees in this country. The derivative
nature of their design tells its own story. It has nothing English
about it. Take the early geometric star pattern or the early coloured
birds and flowers, what else are they but Dutch? Is there anything
in English art like them? The conclusion to which one must arrive
is that the marquetry clock-case panel is Dutch or Anglo-Dutch. The
derivative character runs through the whole gamut from the reticent and
well-balanced panel period to the "all over" phase, when every inch
was covered with marquetry, to the arabesque and intricate mosaic work
reminiscent of Persia, and finally to the decadent period when Eastern
carpets found themselves reproduced in marquetry on the clock-case.
[Illustration: WILLIAM AND MARY CHEST OF DRAWERS.
On original stand. Decorated in marquetry. Side showing panel in common
use by cabinet-makers and clock-case makers.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. Hampton & Son._)]
[Illustration: CHEST OF DRAWERS DECORATED IN MARQUETRY.
Side showing panel in common use by cabinet-makers and clock-case
makers.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons._)]
When the hood of the clock-case became arched and the dial
correspondingly had a lunette, the decorative marquetry panel
in the case below followed the same form. It is possible, indeed
very probable, that many such shaped panels were imported and were
especially intended to meet the demand for use on clock-cases. It
is always possible to a trained eye to see whether a panel has been
made to fit the place in which one finds it. Is it part of a sanely
conceived decorative scheme, or was it used because it happened to be
handy as part of a cabinet-maker's stock-in-trade? We illustrate two
examples of marquetry chests of drawers of the William and Mary period
which offer many interesting features. In regard to the example with
the oval panels (illustrated p. 93), the side of the piece exhibits
a panel that is incongruous where it is. It is a clock-case panel.
Similarly in the "all-over" marquetry chest of drawers of the same
period (illustrated p. 95), the panel at the side is undoubtedly a
clock-case panel. To examine both these chests of drawers in detail is
to discover that the former shows that the panels of the drawers were
carefully thought out before execution. The metal drop-handles in the
centre were each intended to be there. They were in the cabinet-maker's
mind when he made his design and laid his marquetry. He has
accommodated his pattern to receive these handles. In the other example
it is seen that no such care was taken. The escutcheon of the locks
covers a portion of the marquetry. The cabinet-maker in London had his
Dutch-imported panels ready to hand and he used them as he found them.
If some collector or expert were to come along and determine that
all the green and purple and flecked glass of the Early Victorian
period, bottles with long necks and gilded stoppers, in English leather
cases, vases of inimitable colour but execrable form, were typically
English as representing early nineteenth century glass, we should put
his theories aside as nonsense. Partly because we happen to know what
Bohemia was exporting and partly because we know what the English
glassworkers were doing in the same period. But in regard to 1650 to
1700 it is less easy to determine whether a wonderful school of expert
marquetry-workers existed in London as a secret industry. One must
assume that they had quietly assimilated all the technique of the Dutch
craftsmen, and descended on the town, just at the right moment, with
a new art, quite un-English, just at that moment when Dutch fashions
were in the ascendant and when Mary, the consort of William of Orange,
was employing Marot, the late Surveyor of The Hague, to convert Hampton
Court from a Tudor into an Anglo-Orange palace.
On an examination of delft earthenware of the period and Dutch
decorative art in general, it is fairly obvious that the art impulses
coincide with the various phases of ornament as found on the marquetry
panel, whether they were the floriated designs of Italy with the
vase and the symmetrical flowers in conventional form, further
conventionalized by the Dutch, who clung to tulips and carnations, or
the arabesque designs derived from the Dutch traffic with the East
Indies, the pseudo-Persian sherbet tray as a panel, the prayer rug
as a full design. With his black delft to imitate lacquered work of
Japan and his blue delft to imitate the Kang-he Chinese porcelain, the
Dutchman proved himself a superlative translator. The Dutch East India
Company, till it was supplanted, was the conduit-pipe through which the
arts of the East were allowed to pass into Europe.
In another portion of this volume we show how apparently obscure
ornament has a long lineage, and that craftsmen in minor details were
producing something of which possibly they knew not the origin nor the
significance; but it behoves the intelligent collector, who, after all,
is in possession of more facts, spread over a wider area, to arrive
at sane conclusions in regard to workers who wrought better than they
thought.
=The Wall-paper Period.=--It was a sad time when the idea originated
to make wall-paper simulate marble or tapestry or leather, or anything
else. Wall-hangings made of paper by the Chinese came into England in
the early seventeenth century. But European wall-paper is a modern
abomination. Chintz has a better excuse to imitate satin. "Callicoes"
were tabooed at first, but they had and have a legitimate place.
Wall-paper is an affectation which cannot be defended. It always
pretends to be what it is not. It is really wonderful that amateurs did
not paste it over clock-cases. Perhaps they did, and other persons,
wiser in their generation, removed it.
But if wall-paper of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries was not affixed to the clock-case, it was there in spirit,
as it was on strident bureaus and other equally offensive articles of
the period. The "all-over" style exhibits marquetry run mad. Artisans
could apply the thin veneer, ten sheets to the inch, like paper, and
they did. They had borders as common as modern factory-made imitation
lace at a few pence per yard, and they laid them beside the pilasters
and around the already well covered case. There was no square inch
that could be said to be free from the attentions of the gluer of
marquetry sheets. He began to dominate decoration till happily he was
extinguished.
=The Incongruities of Marquetry.=--To those who have handled a good
many examples of marquetry furniture in which panelling is predominant,
such as clock-cases, there is one feature which always strikes the
practised eye. The question arises, How did the marquetry panel come
there? It is another way of expressing the view that the proportion is
radically wrong. A glance at a poor panel of a clock-case, or a faked
panel, or a stupidly wrought panel, is enough. To the collector of old
books nothing is more annoying than to find that the binder with all
his fine tooling has trimmed off the margins of the printed matter and
the illustrations. It is an edition with the space expurgated. It is
the binder _versus_ the printer, and similarly in the clock-case it
is too often the cabinet-maker _versus_ the designer of the marquetry
panel. This is the sentiment one has on looking at many of the
marquetry clock-cases. The persons who received them from Holland did
not always know how to use them correctly. They either cut off their
edges or left so little space as to convey the idea of a curtailed
edition of the original. In the case of the panelled period, when
there were three panels, two of them had more often than not to be cut
off in the middle to make room for the circular aperture in the door
showing the swinging pendulum. When the case-maker received his panels
according to order from the Continent, one would have thought he would
have done away with the hole in the case. But perhaps the clockmaker
insisted otherwise. At any rate, it is a point showing the absence of
intimate relationship between clockmaker and case-maker. Holland seems
to be the answer, in spite of all experts to the contrary.
On the "all-over" marquetry clock-cases there is a decided inclination
to follow the designs found on contemporary delft ware. As to
repetition, however well joined they are, the glue and the wax cannot
hide the poverty of design. Twice or thrice in one case are patterns
repeated. It is the wall-paper artist at work in a smaller area. In
this connection one recalls the decadence of the wood-engravers,
where three or four artists worked on portions of one picture cut
into sections and screwed together as one block. The old journals,
the _Illustrated London News_, and the _Graphic_ and others of the
early 'eighties, tell of this decadence. The thin white lines, as long
as ink and paper last, record this subterfuge. It was the last note
of wood-engraving. Similarly, in marquetry, when we find the almost
invisible lines denoting several hands, or the piecing together of the
same design cunningly to deceive the persons at the period, we at a
later stage read this as the note determining the end, and the end soon
came.
CHAPTER IV
THE LONG-CASE CLOCK--THE PERIOD OF LACQUER
What is lac?--Its early introduction into this country--"The
Chinese taste"--Colour versus form--Peculiarities of the lacquered
clock-case--The English school--English amateur imitators--Painted
furniture not lacquered work--The inn clock.
Lacquered work is the most un-English style of decoration that has
ever been employed by the cabinet-maker in the embellishment of his
furniture. It came from the East and was introduced into this country
about the same period as tea-drinking. At first tea was drunk by
fashionable folk from cups without handles, now it is the national
beverage. Lac is a natural product of China, the sap of a tree in
appearance resembling our ash-tree. It is not an artificial compound
of resin and oils, worked down by turpentine. This natural gum is
refined and coloured red, black, golden yellow, green, or grey. The
surface of the wood is carefully prepared, and a ground is laid on by
degrees, care being taken that each is of the right temperature and
perfectly hard and dry before any layer is applied. Never less than
three and sometimes as many as eighteen thin layers are thus applied
to the surface of the wood before the actual decoration of this ground
by the artist commences. In regard to the use of lac in this country,
practical experts have questioned as to whether it is possible in a
climate like this to effect the clean drying so necessary to attain
perfection. London and other cities, on account of their dust-charged
atmosphere, are unsuited for lacquer work.
The artist draws his design of landscape or figures or birds or
flowers, filling his details with gold or silver and superimposed
colours built up with mastic, of those parts which are intended to be
in slight relief.
The Japanese brought the art of lacquer to the highest perfection. To
those readers who desire to see the art of lacquer shown in its various
stages, there is in the Botanical Museum at Kew Gardens a collection of
specimens in various stages, including sections of the lacquer-tree,
from which the lac exudes, and of various coloured lacs, and examples
illustrating no less than fifty different methods of lacquering
sword-sheaths.
An examination of lacquer work is to be found in _Chinese Art_, vol. i,
by Dr. Stephen W. Bushell, formerly physician to His Majesty's Legation
at Peking. In the print-room of the Imperial Library at Paris is an
album with drawings of the processes and explanatory notes.
The Lacquer Industry in Japan forms a Report of His Majesty's
Acting-Consul at Hakodate (Mr. J. J. Quin), printed as a Parliamentary
Paper in 1882.
=Its Early Introduction into this Country.=--At first the Portuguese
had the monopoly of trade with the Far East. When Philip of Spain
annexed Portugal in 1598, he sought to shut out the Dutch traders from
participation in this trade. By this act he laid the foundation of the
Dutch East India Company. It was only when Cornelius Houtman procured
some Portuguese charts that the Dutch navigators first rounded the Cape
_en route_ for India and China and Japan. The great Dutch East India
Company was established in 1602.
Porcelain and lacquered cabinets and boxes were thus at an early date
distributed as rare articles of curious art at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Drake and Raleigh had captured Spanish galleons
with such treasure, and the Portuguese possession of Goa in India had
brought the wealth of the Far East to Western Europe. Evelyn tells
us in his _Diary_, in 1681, of the richness of the apartments of the
Duchess of Portsmouth at Whitehall. "The very furniture of the chimney
was massy silver. The sideboards were piled with richly wrought
plate. In the niches stood cabinets, the masterpieces of Japanese
art." The dowry of Queen Catherine of Braganza did not come up to the
expectations of the spendthrift Charles, although she came loaded with
"japanned" boxes and rare artistic treasures from the East. Memoirs of
this time furnish abundant proof that lacquered work was, in pieces of
imported furniture, known in this country. But it is little likely
that anything of that nature was manufactured here at that date. As
a nation we had not developed on those lines; it is a fact worth
remembering that as late as the reign of Charles II the greater part of
the iron used in this country was imported from abroad.
="The Chinese Taste."=--This is a term which finds itself repeated like
a parrot-cry from the late years of the seventeenth century. The vogue
reached its height in 1750 as a fashion for the wealthy and a pastime
for the dilettanti, and disturbed the steady growth of national spirit
in art. There was a Chinese Festival at Drury Lane Theatre in 1755.
Chippendale snatched his fretwork in his brackets and the angles of
his chairs from the Chinese worker in ebony. He erected pagoda-like
structures on his cabinets. The Bow china factory termed itself "New
Canton," Worcester copied Chinese models, Bristol carried on the story.
Staffordshire with her earthenware brought out the "willow-pattern,"
and a hundred other designs were acclimatized as reflections of the
blue and white Canton porcelain.
"Taste is at present the darling idol of the polite world and the world
of letters, and, indeed, seems to be considered as the quintessence of
almost all the arts and sciences. The fine ladies and gentlemen dress
with taste, the architects, whether Gothic or Chinese, build with
taste." So writes the essayist in the _Connoisseur_ journal in 1756,
and he continues ironically, "Whoever makes a pagoda of his parlour
fits up his house entirely in taste."
This "Chinese taste" had seized France and Holland. The French
artist-craftsmen readily saw that the great influx of Chinese and
Japanese furniture would stifle their national artistic impulses. Louis
Quatorze had to issue a decree at the end of the seventeenth century
to prohibit the import of Oriental wares. The craze reached England
later and developed later. But early in the eighteenth century the
cabinet-makers of London petitioned Parliament against the importation
of manufactured articles from the East Indies to this country. But
nothing much seems to have come of their protest. The East India
Company had become too powerful to brook interference with its trade by
interested artisans. Thousands of lac panels were brought over in the
company's ships, even in spite of the deep-rooted belief that lacquer
work had at that time become an English art. It is to be presumed that
some of the contentions of the old European lacquer-workers may be
said to be parallel with the assertions of old potters who asseverated
that they had discovered the true porcelain of China. In 1709 Böttger,
at Meissen, had for the first time succeeded in producing white hard,
paste porcelain, not in imitation of the Chinese, but actually a
reproduction of the Oriental technique. But the secret was well kept,
and Böttger and his workmen were imprisoned in a fortress. Since Father
Du Halde, the Jesuit, had published in Paris in 1725 his _Description
de l'Empire de la Chine_, other European potters had endeavoured to
find the natural earths of the Chinese, kaolin and petuntse. When
William Cookworthy, the chemist and potter of Plymouth, wrote of his
discovery of the china clays, Josiah Wedgwood journeyed to Cornwall on
a wild-goose chase.
It may be imagined, with data such as these to guide us--first, the
growing intensity of the "Chinese taste"; second, the demand for
furniture and porcelain on the part of the wealthy classes--that as a
consequence an attempt was made to supply the demand.
There were various sources of supply for lacquered furniture,
especially lacquered clock-cases. There was the Dutch market, from
which was obtained, as in the case of marquetry, panels of lacquered
work. At first, without doubt, these came from the East through
Holland. The next stage was the Dutch lacquered panel actually produced
in Holland. Later there was again the Oriental panel coming straight
from the East through our own East India Company. Contemporaneously
with these importations, which served as models, there was the
lacquered work produced in this country. We shall later attempt to
differentiate between these styles.
=Colour versus Form.=--In various epochs the struggle has gone on in
the applied arts in regard to the use and abuse of colour in decoration
as an adjunct. In furniture the pendulum has swung to and fro. Colour
follows form in the process of evolution. In England there is the oak
period and the walnut period, where the beauty is solely dependent upon
form. The conception of the cabinet-maker has usually been confined
to form, eschewing colour, or to colour more or less ignoring the
beauty of form, or as a compromise, when form has been subservient to
colour. When form and colour are in exact harmony the highest ideals
are reached in furniture. The Chinese have reached these ideals. The
Italian school of the fifteenth century in the marriage coffer, where
painting or coloured intarsia is of parallel beauty with the rich
carving, achieved like success. With similar judgment, in holding the
balance evenly between form and colour, André Charles Boulle conceived
his wonderful work in tortoiseshell and brass and ebony and silver,
forming a brilliant marquetry of colour, the colour effect being
further heightened with a reddish-brown and sometimes a bluish-green
ground beneath the semi-transparent tortoiseshell. Riesener and David
Roentgen, in equally masterful technique, produced marquetry of
tulip-wood, holly, rosewood, purple wood, and laburnum. With the style
embodying the enrichment of the plain surface with colour came the use,
and later the abuse, of lacquered panels.
A Dutch cabinet-maker, Huygens, had won renown by reproducing
remarkable imitations of the Japanese lacquered panel. In Holland,
Chinese prototypes had served as models for delft ware. The Dutch
potter had simulated the appearance of blue and white Chinese
porcelain, but his results were obtained by a white enamel covering a
brown body. Dutch lacquer work is similarly imitative of the results
rather than a duplication of the Oriental processes. Chintzes and
printed "callicoes" equally are surprising efforts at simulation, if
not dissimulation.
As a supreme effort of the successful attempt of the European to
reproduce the wonderful limpid transparency of the old Chinese and
Japanese work, the secret of Sieur Simon Etienne Martin, a French
carriage painter, stands supreme. His varnish, called after him
_Vernis-Martin_, has become the term, as in the case of Boulle, for
a certain class of technique. In 1744 he obtained the monopoly in
France for the manufacture of lacquered work in the Oriental style. He
obtained the ground of wavy golden network, such as in rare Japanese
panels, and on this Boucher and other artists painted Arcadian subjects.
In England it cannot be said that these great foreign styles have
been emulated in the grand manner or even attempted. When colour came
to England it came straight from Holland, and _le style réfugié_ is
responsible for the intermingling of the Dutch and French styles,
though the former were at first greatly predominant. The important
bureaus and splendid lacquered cabinets produced in the period when
colour was employed so lavishly as to disregard form, are attributable,
not for the least part of their excellent technique in the skilful
employment of lacquer, to the great number of French and other foreign
workmen who had settled in this country.
=Peculiarities of the Lacquered Clock-case.=--The use of the lacquered
panel in the long case of the clock cannot be said to have a definite
period of its own. We cannot mark an exact date when marquetry panels
or marquetry "all-over" cases were no longer the vogue, and when
lacquered cases succeeded them. The two styles were comparatively
contemporaneous. Marquetry cases, as we have seen, are as early as
1680, and they continued till about 1725, and later in the provinces.
The lacquered case may be said to have run its day from about 1700
to 1755. On the whole they seemed to have had a longer vogue, mainly
on account of the prevalence of the "Chinese taste," which demanded
colour. Lacquered decoration jumped the experimental stage of reserves
or panels that apparently were not quite in exact proportions to the
case, but had to be fitted in and sometimes trimmed. It came at a
juncture when this difficulty had been mastered. Accordingly, we find
the whole of the lacquered case has been regarded as a rectangular
surface to be decorated, and we have not met with any instance of more
than one lacquered panel being employed on the case. The marquetry
case offered other features which indicated the struggle of colour
for supremacy. In the early marquetry specimens the turned walnut
pillars of the hood belong to an earlier style. They indicate that
that form had not been completely ousted. The marquetry worker in the
end overcame this and drove these pillars out. In the lacquered case
no such struggle is visible. The case is entirely a scheme in colour.
It is red, or green, it is black and gold, but the design is never so
strong as to tempt one to examine its form. It is simply decorative,
but much in the manner that, in textile art, tapestry is pleasing, not
challenging a critical examination of form, but suggesting a somnolent
restfulness.
Touches of incongruity appear in later examples of the lacquered
clock-case when the arched hood came into fashion and the panel
followed suit. It is a shape unsuited to an Oriental design. Such a
Western architectural style used in combination with so Eastern a
technique as lacquered work is like putting a Corinthian pillar on a
Japanese bronze.
The lacquered cases illustrated in this chapter indicate the style. The
example with the movement by Joseph Dudds (1766-82), (illustrated p.
115), shows the early attempt to simulate the Eastern style. It is poor
and thin, and has not stood the ravages of time and a damp climate.
The specimen (illustrated p. 117), with the movement by Kenneth
Maclellan (1760-80), is of more grandiose character. The panelled door
was probably an importation, and the other decorations in lacquer done
in this country.
Among the Scottish clocks, the Patrick Gordon example (1705-15),
(illustrated p. 263), proves this usage of imported Oriental panel with
added decoration in as near a style as could be done on the spot. In
this example the remainder of the so-called lacquered decoration is
stencilled.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK WITH LACQUER DECORATION.
Brass dial with circular medallion with maker's name, "Joseph Dudds,
London" (1766-82).]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Kenneth Maclennan (London).
Finely decorated in green lacquer.
Date, 1760-80. Height, 8 ft. Width, 1 ft. 8 in. Depth, 10 in.
(_By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq._)]
=The English School.=--Dutch lacquered work was as prevalent
between 1680 and 1725 as was Dutch marquetry. The rivalry between
"John Company" and the Dutch traders was one factor that has to be
considered. Lacquered work was coming straight from the East to
Amsterdam and to English ports. What was not absorbed by the Dutch
burghers came to England. Apart from this competitive Oriental
trade, there was the lacquered work actually made in Holland.
In examining the state of that country at this time one meets with a
surprise. It was a land teeming with colour. Dutch painters have taught
us to think otherwise. The Rijks Museum exhibits the prevalent styles
of the seventeenth century. Here we find leather decorations derivative
from Spain in rich gilding, Louis Quatorze boudoirs with classic gods
and goddesses. The "Chinese Boudoir" from the palace of the Stadtholder
at Leeuwarden shows the intense love of colour that had conquered
Holland in the late seventeenth century. Here we find the Chinese
prototypes in porcelain which provided the potters at Delft with
problems to solve, and lacquered work which suggested patient imitation
by Dutch cabinet-makers, but the colour and advanced technique of such
Oriental originals must have confounded the old craftsmen.
The potter simulated the porcelain with his enamelled earthenware, the
cabinet-maker produced lacquered work which passed muster in Holland
and England. Take the house of the rich burgher. The table was covered
with an Eastern rug, called a "table carpet." The linen cupboards so
beloved by the Dutch were surmounted by Chinese and Japanese porcelain.
Often a Japanese lac cabinet gave another touch of colour to the
interior. Rich damask curtains, Spanish leather hangings, Oriental
rugs, finely inlaid cabinets of ebony and silver, and a glowing array
of copper and brass, filled the heart of the Dutch _vrouw_ with pride.
Such rooms were regarded as a "holy of holies," and the family had
their meals in the kitchen or living room and were warned off the show
room. The seventeenth-century Dutchwoman, according to all accounts,
seems to have been a shrew. But enough is extant to prove that Holland
was artistically, in regard to the home-life of Stadtholder and
burgher, resplendent with colour, in spite of the low tones of the
canvases of Dutch painters.
In England, too, the love of colour was becoming predominant. Fifty
thousand Huguenot families, with their Latin blood and love of colour,
scattered in the Protestant countries had no inconsiderable influence.
Spitalfields silk is as English as the dark and tortuous lanes from
which it emanates. But every weaver had a French name, and although
the industry has come to an end, tomorrow, if the demand arose, the
descendants of these French Huguenots would again stand at the looms to
produce English silk.
The sudden outburst of colour in the now rarely prized English
lacquered cabinets and bureaus must be attributed to the foreign
workmen in our midst at the close of the seventeenth century. It is
English perforce, because it was made in England. The followers of
Huygens the Dutchman and the disciples of Martin the Frenchman were
capable of producing something new and something surprising in English
cabinet work. The foreign quarters of London have always been the
centre of art industry. Armenians sit on the roofs of fashionable
West End emporiums and restore carpets and rugs. Polish and Russian
furriers travel by the Tube from Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, from
the Commercial Road and Shoreditch to Regent Street and Bond Street
with their handiwork. What is now, was two hundred and fifty years ago.
Alien craftsmen, more skilled than the English workmen, worked for less
wages and produced better work.
The English style, therefore, of the late seventeenth century in
lacquered work was as English as the work of Daniel Marot the Frenchman
and of Grinling Gibbons the Dutch woodcarver at Hampton Court.
The English style is praised as something fine and original as a
European replica of the Oriental. So it is. It is the French grafted
on to the Dutch and acclimatized here. It holds the same place in
lacquered work as the Dutch delft ware does in ceramics. It is a
splendid imitation of a technique not grasped by the imitator. Lovers
of lacquered rarities and collectors of the so-called English style,
so rare and so much extolled, can take it to heart that it is really
English--as English as the canvases of Vandyck or the painted panels of
pergolesi.
=English Amateur Imitators.=--There are records enough to show
that the art of lacquer had appealed to the amateur on account of
its apparent simplicity. It is ludicrous to read of the attempts
of seventeenth-century teachers of the art of "japanning" to young
ladies. The seventeenth-century "miss," according to old memoirs,
left her Stuart stump needlework, with its quaint costume and crude
figures, to simulate the subtle art of the Chinese or Japanese
lacquer-worker. At that time the greatest coach-panel painter could
not have approached the finesse of the lacquered work coming from the
East. In spite of Stalker and Parker in 1688, with their treatise how
to produce lacquered "japanning" in the Oriental style--a guide for
amateurs and the standard work for all the academies that taught this
new accomplishment--we cannot believe much of this amateur work found
its way on clock-cases, which in point of time heralded the oncoming
burst of colour. It is incredible that all of a sudden, following
the clock-case and the chair-back, fine red and green and black and
gold lac decoration, as exhibited by rich cabinets and gorgeous
bureaus scintillating with colour, could have succeeded the stump-work
amateurs. Stalker and company must go by the board as caterers for a
very amateur taste. Their book possibly never reached the trade, or if
it did, it could have had very little influence upon adept refugees
practising a subtle art.
=Painted Furniture not Lacquered Work.=--Whatever may be determined as
to the merits of _Vernis-Martin_ or of the creations of Huygens the
Dutchman in regard to comparison with Chinese and Japanese prototypes,
it is certain that English amateur work, which is often dull gold
design on a black ground, is not only an echo but a feeble echo of the
original. They are splendid examples of dulness. Pepys complains that
women wore feathers in his day. The feminine instinct is difficult to
reckon with. Some years ago very up-to-date young wives "aspinalled"
everything pea-green or peacock-blue. They did a lot of damage.
Similarly, in the seventeenth century, when the boudoir escaped from
needlework into lacquer, much otherwise harmless furniture must have
been spoilt. Hundreds of fine pieces of furniture were brought up to
date by the simple process of painting them and simulating the Chinese
lacquered work. In the Early Victorian age of graining, sapient workmen
painted solid oak panels and grained them to resemble the oak that
they had painted. Folly is not the monopoly of any age. It is eternal.
To-day the framer, if he is not watched and carefully instructed, glues
a fine engraving to a sheet of cardboard and rubs a wet cloth over the
surface of the print, destroying its beauty for ever with his clod-like
smudge. Fools are ever present to confound the conservation of art
treasures.
Painting a surface, however Oriental it may be in design, is _not_
lacquer work. Half the so-called lacquered work is merely painting
with a coat of varnish put on it. When Sheraton and his school brought
French painted panels into fashion in this country, they brought a
true art. But it was not lacquer. Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, and
Pergolesi, who used their brushes on cabinet work, and Zoffany, who did
not disdain to paint clock-cases for Rimbault, brought a new style to
this country. It was the age of colour-prints in the French taste; the
Wards, the George Morlands, and the Bartolozzis demanded colour as a
suitable environment. Satinwood and coloured marquetry and the painted
panel accordingly found a place at this moment.
The amateur attempts of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
up to the _furore_ of the "Chinese taste" in 1750, must be disregarded
as something outside the field of the collector--that is, if he is
desirous of selecting lacquered work of excellent character. As a
phase of fashionable caprice it is no doubt interesting, but it is
to be hoped that most of these amateur efforts have succumbed to the
influence of time and have been destroyed. They represent nothing
in particular except a sham imitation of a great art, as stupidly
offensive as was Strawberry Hill, the Gothic toy of Horace Walpole.
=The Inn Clock.=--We interpolate here a short outline of a class of
clocks which appeals to collectors. In America they are termed "banjo
clocks." A good deal has been written about them, connecting them
with Pitt's tax on clocks and watches in 1797 of five shillings on
each clock per annum, which Act was repealed in the next year. It is
supposed that these clocks suddenly came into being when private clocks
were taxed, and were used in inns. Owing to such a deep-seated belief
they are always known throughout the country as "Act of Parliament"
clocks. But they were used earlier than the Act of 1797, and were
probably ordinary inn clocks in common use about that time. They were
wall clocks varnished with black lacquer, mostly plain, but sometimes
decorated in gold. Often the figures were in white and they had no
protective glass.
[Illustration: INN CLOCK.
Decorated in black and gold lacquer.
Maker, John Grant (Fleet Street). About 1785.
Formerly in possession of Sir Augustus Harris.
(_By courtesy of John R. Southworth, Esq._)]
The example illustrated (p. 125) is decorated in black and gold
lacquer, and the name on the dial is John Grant, Fleet Street, about
1785. This is rather an elaborate specimen, as most of the ordinary
inn clocks of this shape are innocent of these rather elaborate lacquer
enrichments. They are to be found all over the country; we have seen
one in an inn at Evesham. They are in Kent and the south, but do not
appear to have been in common use in the northern counties, unless
imported there later. Ale-house jests are frequent on old earthenware
mugs--"Drink faire, don't swear"--and broad hints as to credit. This is
similarly found as a standing pointed jest in an "Act of Parliament"
clock in a Kentish inn, minus the works, with the inscription "No
Tick"--a jest which the most seasoned toper could readily understand.
Oliver Goldsmith, when he wrote his _Deserted Village_ in 1770, is said
to have described in "Sweet Auburn" a typical Irish village in regard
to its desertion, but he introduced touches reminiscent of his town
habits. When he wrote of the village ale-house:--
The whitewash'd wall, the nicely sanded floor,
The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door,
he may have been thinking of inn clocks he had seen in Fleet Street. By
his use of the word "varnished" it would appear that Goldsmith had in
mind the ale-house clock of which we are speaking. There was no other
that was "varnished," that is, lacquered. The term "Act of Parliament"
clocks must therefore be discarded; these clocks were common inn
clocks, and had nothing to do with the Act levying the tax in 1797.
As a rule, elaborately lacquered examples of such clocks should be
regarded with caution by the collector. The inn clock was "varnished,"
but it had no panelled lacquer and lattice-work gold ornament. It was a
simple hanging wall clock _sans_ artistic embellishment.
CHAPTER V
THE LONG-CASE CLOCK--THE GEORGIAN PERIOD
The stability of the "grandfather" clock--The burr-walnut
period--Thomas Chippendale--The mahogany period--Innovations of
form--The Sheraton style--Marquetry again employed in decoration.
To collectors and connoisseurs the most desirable period of the
long-case clock is from 1700 to about 1720. As we have seen in the
previous chapters, this embraces the two styles of marquetry and
lacquered work, although lacquered work continued to the middle of the
eighteenth century. The year 1720 is not an arbitrary date, but this
year is a convenient one. It marks the accession of the first of the
Four Georges and the advent of the House of Hanover. As the title to
a period of time, the Georgian period is as good as any other. Just a
hundred years afterwards George III died, and the Fourth George reigned
only ten years, till 1830.
In regard to the clock-case, the century was not filled with great
changes. The writers of memoirs of the time--Selwyn and Walpole, Lord
Hervey and Fanny Burney--furnish many sidelights on the Georgian
period. Thackeray in his _Four Georges_ illuminated the Georgian era
with more vigour than Early Victorians could stand. The eighteenth
century is repellent by its stupidity and coarseness, by its insipidity
and dulness, and yet it is relieved by a continuity of extraordinary
forcefulness and freshness of vigour, undimmed in our naval and
military history, unequalled in our art and letters. The following
names occur to prove this suggestion: Clive and Warren Hastings, Rodney
and Nelson, Moore and Wellington, Reynolds and Gainsborough, Dr.
Johnson and Burke.
We lost, but not for ever, the love of the American Colonies for
the great Mother Country, whose tongue is a common heritage, and
whose democratic freedom is akin to that across the Atlantic, and
this through the obstinacy of a German monarch thwarting the will
of the people. "The first and second Georges were not Englishmen,
and therefore were not popular, and excited no enthusiasm in their
subjects, but were simply tolerated as being better than the Popish
Stuarts"; so says Lord Macaulay in his _Essay on Chatham_. It is
ludicrous to learn that Walpole, beefy Englishman that he was, spoke
no French, and had, as George I spoke no English, to conduct State
affairs in Latin. What a stratum of misunderstanding on which to rest a
people's destinies!
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Henderson (London).
Date, about 1770.
Height, 9 ft. Width, 1 ft. 8-1/2 in. Depth, 11 in.]
=The Stability of the "Grandfather" Clock.=--The long-case clock had
become a piece of furniture. It was of marquetry decoration, in keeping
with contemporary tables and cabinets, or it was lacquered in rich
colours in "Chinese taste" to keep touch with the Oriental parlours.
But concurrent with the age of marquetry and lacquer was the great
walnut period. The delightful veneer of burr-walnut in Queen Anne
days in cabinets and chests of drawers and other important pieces of
furniture did not neglect the clock-case. The gnarled figure of the
walnut was essentially a proper decoration to apply to the clock-case.
The long-case clock had not only become acclimatized, but it had become
thoroughly English. The simplicity of its construction, and its proud
record as a perfect timekeeper, gave it the supremacy over all other
clocks. English clockmakers, with the fine sense of practical utility
which governed their employment of mechanism, had reached a point
when further inventions became more of scientific use than popular.
The "grandfather" clock has no equal within its limits. It runs for
eight days. Its construction is so simple that when needing repair it
need not be sent to a specialist. It has no delicate parts to confound
the provincial maker. Hence it has lasted two centuries and more as a
standard English clock. There is, too, a certain lovableness about the
"grandfather" clock. The popular term suggests this. It is the heritage
of the poor. The "grandfather" clock of the yeomanry has passed down
through many generations. Indeed, the love of it as an article of
furniture has, in many instances, endowed it with a value far greater
than it possesses.
=The Burr-walnut Period.=--Veneer had become an established technique.
Woods with fine figure served as panels laid on wood of lesser rarity
or decorative importance. Oak was a good foundation for walnut veneer.
Earlier, as we have seen, walnut was laid as a ground on oak and the
marquetry design laid on the walnut. But in the burr-walnut period
carefully selected walnut sheets were employed to decorate surfaces of
bureaus and clock-cases. The age of walnut is synonymous with the days
of Hogarth.
Burr-walnut clock-cases are not so frequently found as could be wished.
The burr-walnut panels are marked in a series of knot-like rings,
obtained from the gnarled roots of the walnut-tree. The peculiar
pleasing effect of this and other mottled walnut is heightened by the
mellow effect time always gives to these walnut examples, which cannot
be produced with any appreciable success by modern imitators.
=Thomas Chippendale--The Mahogany Period.=--There is no doubt that
the name of Thomas Chippendale will always be representative of the
mahogany period of English furniture. But there were other makers
contemporary with him who did splendid work. The Chippendales, Thomas
the father and Thomas the son, picture-frame carver and cabinet-maker
at Worcester, migrated together to London in 1729. The son, Thomas,
published his _Director_ in 1754. He was the leading cabinet-maker and
designer of his day, and his day lasted till about 1780, when his son,
Thomas Chippendale the third entered into partnership with Haig,
and the firm became Chippendale and Haig, who also in turn produced
magnificent work. Close upon the heels of the Chippendales was the firm
of Hepplewhite. The brothers Adam, architectural designers and creators
of furniture suitable for its new classic environment, began to make
their impress upon interior decoration and on furniture, as they had
upon Princes Street, Edinburgh, the Quays at Dublin, and the Adelphi in
London, with their patent stucco mouldings and festoons.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Thomas Wagstaff (Gracechurch Street, London). Date, about 1780.
Height, 8 ft. 2 in. Width, 1 ft. 7-1/2 in. Depth, 10 in.
(_By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq._)]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Movement by Stephen Rimbault, case by Robert Adam.
Date, about 1775.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons._)]
Accordingly, the student must bear in mind these great movements
taking place during the second half of our Georgian period, viz.
from about 1740 to the year 1791, at which date appeared the first
edition of Sheraton's _Cabinet Maker and Upholsterers Drawing Book_,
to herald another style, blended with the Adam, but departing from
it at important points. In examining clock-cases of this prolific
and restless period, it should be of exceptional interest to the
connoisseur to show how unnamed cabinet-makers in London and in the
provinces attempted to employ, with varying degrees of skill, the
designs promulgated broadcast by these great teachers of design and
construction in cabinet work.
=Innovations of Form.=--As exemplifying the variations of the mahogany
period clock-case, we illustrate several types showing reflections
of the great impulses that were in the air. The clock, illustrated
(p. 239), has a case of Spanish mahogany with fine figure. The hood
is enriched with fretwork, and with elegantly moulded door, and the
superstructure as a pediment exhibits the Chinese style. The terminals
are mahogany. The dial shows phases of the moon, and the movement is by
a provincial maker, E. Cockey, Warminster.
Of the year 1770 is another mahogany clock with handsomely carved
frieze and elaborate terminals. The love for architectural ornament is
seen in the hood, and in the pillars on the waist below on each side
of the panelled door. The base is decorated with a panel, in mahogany
of fine figure. The feet are beginning to become more pronounced. The
movement of this is by Henderson, of London, and its height is 9 feet
(illustrated p. 133).
Another clock, by Thomas Wagstaff, in date about 1780, exhibits a
less grandiose appearance. The height is less, being only 8 feet 2
inches. The pediment of the hood reverts to types which are often found
decorated with lacquer work, and the brass terminals are of similar
character to those of an earlier period. It is noticeable that the base
continues to show increased ornament in the feet, with an added scroll
(illustrated p. 137).
As showing another type of clock with magnificent decoration we
illustrate (p. 143) the hood of a long-case musical clock, attributed
to Rimbault, who was especially noteworthy for his musical movements,
and his cases were decorated by Zoffany. An examination of this
shows the detailed character of the painted work. It is Italian in
conception, and quite in keeping with other work of Zoffany.
[Illustration: TOP PORTION OF MUSICAL LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Richly decorated with painting attributed to Zoffany.
Maker, no signature, but suggestive of the work of Rimbault.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. Harris & Sinclair, Dublin._)]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Eight-day movement. Mahogany case inlaid with satinwood shell designs
and banding.
Maker, James Hatton, London (1800-12).
Brick design in base in Chippendale manner.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. D. Sherratt & Co., Chester._)]
Another illustration (p. 139) shows the typical classical style. The
case was designed by Robert Adam, and is in date about 1775.
The dial becomes circular, and owes certain of its decoration to
French form, although it is surmounted by a Greek urn, but the flying
garlands betray it. The waist becomes tapered, terminating in a base
of graceful proportions and reticent ornament. The fluted work and the
scroll indicate the design of the architect. One can imagine such a
chaste clock finding itself in the cold, un-English environment of Ken
Wood, or on the staircase of some learned society, with candelabra of
bronze of classic design, with hoofs as feet and with the Roman lamp
throwing out its modern flame. The movement of this clock is by Stephen
Rimbault, of Great St. Andrew Street, about 1775.
Another example of a clock by James Hatton, London (about 1810),
exhibits several new features. Its case is of rich feathered mahogany,
inlaid in the Sheraton manner with satinwood shells, banding, and
herring-bone stringing. The hood is massive and reverts to an earlier
period, and the ornament of the base, in brickwork style, was known to
have been employed by Chippendale. The finials are brass. The dial is
brass, and in the lunette are painted a ship and a cottage (illustrated
p. 145).
For the continuation of these styles one must turn to the provincial
makers (Chapter VIII), showing a variety of decoration and touches of
incongruity in style and anachronism in date--a glorious intermingling
of contemporary with bygone features, affording unequalled delight
to the collector. In the case of provincial made furniture, whole
districts carried on fashions for a quarter of a century or longer
after they had been forgotten in London, and the clock-case is no
exception.
Included in this period is the fine clock (illustrated p. 149) by
Robert Molyneux and Sons, London, 1825, now in the Bristol Museum. It
has one main dial recording minutes, and two smaller dials showing
hours and seconds respectively. The main dial has two hands, which
indicate Greenwich mean time and Bristol time. The type is known as a
"regulator" clock, with the twenty-four-hour dial and other additions
appertaining to the astronomical clock. The illustration shows the time
to be: Greenwich, 11.42 (i.e. 42 minutes past 11 o'clock); Bristol,
11.32 (i.e. 10 minutes difference). The clock has a mercury pendulum.
There was a somewhat similar clock constructed by Dell, of Bristol.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE REGULATOR CLOCK.
Movement by Robert Molyneux & Sons, London. 1825. Three dials, one
showing hours and one seconds, the great dial showing Greenwich time
and Bristol time.
ENLARGEMENT OF DIAL.
The two hands on large or minute dial show difference of 10 minutes 22
seconds between Greenwich and Bristol time.
(_By permission of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery._)]
CHAPTER VI
THE EVOLUTION OF THE LONG-CASE CLOCK
Its inception--Its Dutch origin--The changing forms of the
hood, the waist, and the base--The dial and its character--The
ornamentation of the spandrel--The evolution of the hands.
From 1680 to 1850 is a long period of time for a particular style of
timepiece to run without interruption or without displacement by any
other fashion. It may naturally be supposed that during this period
changes have occurred in form, in decoration, and in a score of minor
details delightful to the collector and interesting to the student of
form in design. The inception of the long case was due to the common
use of the seconds pendulum. This required a certain space to swing
in, and the pendulum was of a certain length. This undue length does
not seem to have been necessary in the wall clock of the so-called
"Act of Parliament" type, and as Lord Grimthorpe, the constructor of
"Big Ben" at Westminster, says: "Spring clocks are generally resorted
to for the purpose of saving length; for as clocks are generally made
in England, it is impossible to make a weight clock capable of going
a week, without either a case nearly 4 feet high, or else the weights
so heavy as to produce a great friction on the arbour of the great
wheel. But this arises from nothing but the heaviness of the wheels and
the badness of the pinions used in most English clocks, as is amply
proved by the fact that the American and Austrian clocks go a week
with smaller weights and much less fall than English ones, and the
American ones with no assistance from fine workmanship for the purpose
of diminishing friction, as they are remarkable for their want of what
is called 'finish' in the machinery, on which so much time and money is
wasted in English clock-work."
=Its Dutch Origin.=--As we have before explained, the marquetry case
came straight from Holland. Our "grandfather" was a Dutchman, as
far as clock-cases go. The Dutchman Huygens is credited with having
been the first to employ the pendulum in the mechanism of the clock.
Leonardo da Vinci, that stupendous genius, left notes as to his study
of the pendulum (1452-1520), and Galileo came with his later studies
(1564-1642). It is a disputed point as to when and where the pendulum
came into being. We must accept Huygens (1629-95) as the practical
exponent of the pendulum, although not the original discoverer of its
properties. But at any rate, the long-case clock may be generally
accepted as coincident with the use of the long or seconds pendulum.
And to Holland we must look for this habitual usage of the long wooden
case to protect the weights and the pendulum.
Among the designs of Marot there are drawings of long-case clocks
certainly more ornate than those usually associated with such an early
period (this was about 1660 to 1680), and French Louis XIV and Louis XV
tall clocks are built on these lines, and Chippendale at a later period
found Marot an exceedingly prolific master of design to study.
=The Changing Forms of the Hood, the Waist, and the Base.=--The
evolution of form in one class of object from one period to another
is of exceptional interest. In furniture, in china, in glass, and in
silver, the progression of forms is so marked as to give practically
a date to each piece. The gate-leg table can be traced from three to
twelve legs with double gates. The chair, from its straight oaken back
and massive arms to the tapering legs and curves of the satinwood
period, runs through stages as definitely marked as though the makers
had signed the pieces. Now the stretcher is low, next it becomes
higher, then it disappears altogether; or the splats in the back are
single, then double, with cane panels, and then again upholstered. The
top rail of the chair affords similar delectation to the connoisseur of
form changing for a definite reason.
The clock-case underwent equal changes in character, not only in its
decoration, as we have seen, in marquetry, in lacquer, and in veneers
of burr-walnut and mahogany, but its proportions varied. At first,
coming as it did in the walnut period, the hood had turned rails, in
keeping with the turned rails of the chairs of the time. The hood
was square and small, the waist was more slender, and the base in
proportion. During the marquetry and the lacquered periods the hood
began to grow larger and more dominant. It had a domed superstructure,
and the finials or metal terminals were more ornamental and grew in
number (see illustrations, pp. 133, 117). The massive character of the
early mahogany period, culminating with Chippendale, had its effect on
the long clock-case. The hood had a pagoda-like edifice in the Chinese
style (see illustration, p. 239), or it had the woodcarver's adoption
of architecture, as in the crest of the hood (see illustrations, pp.
145, 117). The rail in the hood had become a Corinthian pillar, and
later a pilaster. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the
nineteenth century it had a new form: when it was turned mahogany
it stood away from the case, as an ornament apart, rather than a
supporting pillar (see illustration, p. 233). This is a noticeable
feature in country-made clocks of this period.
At first there was no door in the case. But on the introduction of
the door, its panelled form commenced to make its progression in form
in accompaniment with the other features of the case. It was square,
in simple forms, with square hoods. In 1730 it took the form somewhat
similar to the shape of the lowest marquetry panel, as shown in the
clock by Jas. Leicester (see Frontispiece). It really follows the
chair-backs of a period of some ten or fifteen years' prior date. It
is an instance of the clock-case slightly lagging behind contemporary
furniture design. The shapes of these panels resemble the chair-backs
of the James II, William and Mary, and the Queen Anne period. In some
instances the simple form becomes taller, terminating in a small
semicircle. The Sussex iron fire-backs of the seventeenth century show
similar forms of panel.
By 1770 the panel had lost its lunette or semi-circular form at top,
and in outline resembled a Chippendale chair-back. The evolution is
easily traceable. A similar fashion is observed in tombstones in old
country churchyards. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, especially in certain North of England type clock-cases,
notably Lancashire and Cheshire, these panels are Gothic in character
(see illustration, p. 231). Following French fashion, in some late
examples there is a glass panel (see illustration, p. 275).
The base undergoes certain changes, though in a lesser degree.
Sometimes plain, sometimes with a plinth, sometimes with feet. Dutch
long clock-cases have great wooden balls as feet. In the Chippendale
period the plinth has a suggestion of Chinese character. In later
types the feet are more pronounced, and the base has an ornamental
panel in the Sheraton period with a delicate marquetry inlay of simple
character. In Sheraton's _Design Book_ there are two clocks showing the
base further ornamented by turned pillars similar to the hood.
The growing importance of these feet and their frequent use, especially
in ornate examples, are shown in the specimens illustrated (pp. 133,
137).
=The Dial and its Character.=--When only one hand was in use, it was
obviously not necessary to denote the minutes. Later, the minutes were
engraved on the dial to meet the use of the minute hand; sometimes
these were in a circle inside the hour numerals, and later they were
put on the outer edge, outside the hour numerals. The hour numerals are
almost invariably of Roman style, and the figure IV has by universal
custom been engraved IIII, though there are examples of a late period
with IV which are of country make. Similarly, Arabic figures have also
been used. The illustration of a fine dial, of eighteenth century
period, showing the various phases of the iron industry at Ashburnham,
in Sussex, has these figures; this is a country-made clock (p. 243).
The dials were brass, and the hour numerals appeared on a circle of
brass plated with silver. Iron dials were used later, in the decadent
period, and both numerals and floral designs were painted on the
enamelled surface in lieu of engraved and ornamental metal-work, and
often a landscape or figure subject occupied the lunette.
The lunette form followed the square face, and sometimes the maker put
his name in this lunette, and later below the centre of the clock,
and later again not at all on the dial. The lunette form no doubt
determined the shape of the panel of the door in the case below, to
which we have previously alluded. The illustration (p. 159) shows
these forms. The dial, by Henry Massy (1680), has the name between the
numerals VI and VII. The lunette form in a dial by John Draper (1703)
has the name of the maker in a circular disc above the hour circle.
[Illustration: BRASS DIAL BY HENRY MASSY, LONDON. ABOUT 1680.
Clock with usual eight-day movement.
(An enlargement of this dial is illustrated p. 163).
(_By courtesy of Edward Campbell, Esq., Glasgow._)]
[Illustration: BRASS DIAL BY JOHN DRAPER, LONDON. ABOUT 1703.
Spandrels exhibiting later floral style of decoration.
(_At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York._)]
Enlargements of the Henry Massy dial and of another by John Bushman
show the character of engraving and the position of the maker's name
(illustrated p. 163).
In regard to the engraving put on the dials of these old clocks, it
is not impossible that William Hogarth, when he was an apprentice
at Master Ellis Gamble's shop, at the sign of the "Golden Angel"
in Cranbourn Street, Leicester Fields, did some of this work. We
know that Thomas Bewick engraved clock dials when an apprentice at
Newcastle-upon-Tyne (see p. 215).
The last form of the long-case dial is circular, an unusual type in
vogue during the closing decades of the eighteenth century, belonging
to the classic and French styles and in no way diverting the fashion of
the main stream of case-makers.
Concerning the use of glass for the protection of the dial in the
long-case clock, it was in use in coaches for the first time in 1667.
According to Pepys' _Diary_ we learn: "Another pretty thing was my
Lady Ashly's speaking of the bad qualities of the glass coaches, among
others the flying open of the doors upon any great shake; but another,
my Lady Peterborough, being in her glass coach with the glass up, and
seeing a lady pass by in a coach whom she would salute, the glass was
so clear that she thought it had been open, and so ran her head through
the glass."
At first the hood of the clock lifted off and the glass was fixed;
later the glass was framed in a door, and subsequently the hood slid
off, which fashion is found in all but the earliest examples.
The term "dial" is a survival of the word "sundial." Like all
innovations, there may have been those who preferred the old character,
or it may have been left to Charles Lamb, lover of past and faded
memories, to ruminate on garden gods in the Temple: "What an antique
air had the now almost effaced sundials, with their moral inscriptions,
seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take
their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding
correspondence with the fountain of light.... The shepherd, 'carved
it out quaintly in the sun,' and turning philosopher by the very
occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than tombstones."
Elia, Shakespearean scholar that he was, could not have forgotten the
melancholy Jaques with his:--
I met a fool i' the forest,
A motley fool; a miserable world!
As I do live by food, I met a fool;
Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun,
And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms,
In good set terms and yet a motley fool.
"Good morrow, fool," quoth I. "No, sir," quoth he,
"Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune":
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely: "It is ten o'clock:
Thus we may see," quoth he, "how the world wags:
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale."
[Illustration: ENLARGEMENT OF DIAL.
Showing maker's name, John Bushman, London. About 1680.
From lantern clock illustrated as Frontispiece.]
[Illustration: ENLARGEMENT OF DIAL.
Showing maker's name, Hen. Massy, London, and square dial indicating
date of month. About 1680.
From long-case clock illustrated p. 159.]
It is not probable that the "fool i' the forest" drew from his pocket a
sundial; it was, no doubt, a pocket-clock, or, in other words, a watch.
The art of dial-making is a subtle one. It is true that some are
pleasing in their balance and others are displeasing, which sets us
wondering what rules there are to govern the symmetrical arrangement
of circles and figures and their co-related hands. There is an air of
solemn grandeur about a fine dial; its dignity is as unruffled as the
march of Time itself. The old masters of dial construction had the
art of spacing as completely under control as had Caxton the great
typographer in the balance of his printed page.
What Lord Grimthorpe has said[3] about the dials of turret clocks
applies in its principles to the dials of domestic clocks. "The
figures are generally made much too large. People have a pattern
dial painted; and if the figures are not as long as one-third of the
radius, and therefore occupying, with the minutes, about two-thirds of
the area of the dial, they fancy they are not large enough to be read
at a distance; whereas the fact is, the more the dial is occupied by
figures, the less distinct they are, and the more difficult it is to
distinguish the position of the hands, which is what people want to
see, and not to read the figures, which may very well be replaced by
twelve large spots.... The rule which has been adopted, after various
experiments, as the best for the proportions of the dial is this:
Divide the radius into three, and leave the inner two-thirds clear and
flat, and of some colour forming a strong contrast to the colour of
the hands--black or dark blue if they are gilt, and white if they are
black. The figures, if there are any, should occupy the next two-thirds
of the remaining third, and the minutes be set in the remainder near
the edge."
[3] _Encyclopædia Britannica_ (ninth edition), vol. vi.
=The Ornamentation of the Spandrel.=--There are some interesting types
of ornamentation of the space between the hour circle and the square
outlines of the dial. The neat filling of spandrels offered problems to
the architect and woodworker long before the clockmaker found similar
difficulties. It is not easy exactly to fill a triangle with a design
that is pleasing. Some of the best examples are found in Italian
lettering, old sixteenth-century woodcuts of the letter L.
In English clocks, the spandrel in the lantern clock about 1670 had a
plain cherub head, as simple in character as the fine pearwood carving
from a Buckinghamshire church we illustrate of a slightly earlier
period, still rich with unimpaired colour (p. 167). German clocks had
this device of the cherub's head, but not in the spandrel. At the
British Museum there is one example with this cherub-head as a base
ornament at the foot of the clock, which rests on it. This is in date
1600.
[Illustration: ENGLISH WOOD-CARVING.
Painted and gilded. Early seventeenth century.
(_In collection of author._)]
[Illustration: BRASS SPANDREL.
From dial of clock by Henry Massy (London), 1680, illustrated p. 159.]
The design of the cherub with outspread wings was common enough in
Italy, where children have served as models since Donatello. It became
established as a form and was a favourite embellishment of the English
stone-carver in the seventeenth century. Horace Walpole protested
at its abuse by the contemporaries of Christopher Wren, and it can be
found outside St. Paul's Cathedral and in many other London churches
and over late Stuart doorways.
It was, therefore, nothing new; it was a pleasing spandrel ornament
which appealed to the clockmaker as suitable to clock dials. It
naturally received floriated additions, and both in its simpler form
and in this later and more elaborate variation it appears on the
spandrels of clock dials (see p. 167).
It is interesting to find the clockmaker so conservative. Once the
cherub found its way on to clocks, there it remained. It is in the
clock at Windsor Castle which Henry VIII gave to Anne Boleyn, formerly
at Strawberry Hill before Queen Victoria purchased it. In its first
form on the spandrel it practically followed the simple woodcarver's
design we illustrate, but with this difference: the triangle to be
filled by the clockmaker in his spandrels, at each of the four corners
of his dial, was exactly opposite to that of the woodcarver or the
stone-carver where he made a bracket. The triangle in these cases stood
on its apex. The clockmaker's triangle stood on its base. Hence it will
be observed that a straight line drawn along the head of the cherub (p.
167) finds itself level with the top of the two wings. The clockmaker
modified this in his metal spandrel ornaments. He dropped the wings, so
that the top of the cherub's head is the apex of the triangle and the
tips of the two wings the base.
Later, the head, although still retained, was enveloped in floriated
ornament and the cherub became unrecognizable. But the triangle is well
filled.
We next come to a most interesting stage, coincident in time with the
rebuilding of Hampton Court. The "Glorious Revolution" had become
established and James II sent packing. The two cherubs holding up the
Protestant crown would seem by its prevalence at this period to be a
sort of symbolic record of events that were happening. Huguenot and
Dutch metal-workers put their thoughts into form, and we find this
William and Mary Protestant emblem on the clock-face (see p. 171).
But we also find it on the stretcher of the walnut chair of the period
(as illustrated, p. 171). Nor is this all. Lambeth and Bristol delft
dishes contribute their pæan in honour of the House of Orange. On some
a crown is found, with the date 1690, the sole decoration of a plate
some 9 inches in diameter. On others a crown is shown on a cushion,
with the sceptre and orb beside it. These are all contemporary with
other English delft dishes bearing crudely painted portraits of William
and Mary crowned.
Cardinal Wolsey's coat of arms, as shown at Hampton Court, was two
cherubs supporting a cardinal's hat. One can imagine that Queen
Mary, backed by little Christopher Wren, brought Daniel Marot and
Grinling Gibbons to put an end to all this. Accordingly, if one pays
a pilgrimage to Hampton Court one sees the carved angels triumphantly
holding up the Protestant crown to supplant Wolsey's former insignia
of arrogant splendour under the old religion.
[Illustration: DETAIL OF STRETCHER OF WALNUT CHAIR.
Of William and Mary period.]
[Illustration: BRASS SPANDREL OF DIAL OF CLOCK.
Showing design of angels supporting crown.]
In regard to the long continuance of this design, it is interesting to
observe that it appears in plates attributed to the Lowestoft factory.
As a matter of fact, such plates were made in Holland to the order of
some shipmaster. They usually celebrate the wedding of some persons
in the district, whose names are still known. They are decorated in
blue, and have two cherubs supporting a heart, over which is a crown.
There is one dated 1755, inscribed "Henry and Mary Quinton, Yarmouth,
Norfolk." Its Dutch origin is proven by the orthography with the two
dots over the letters _y_, and the misplacing of other letters: "Henrÿ
and Marÿ Q[.u]inton, Yarmo[.u]th, nor ff: olk. 1755."
After the two cherubs on the clock spandrel came further floriated
designs minus the cherub's head. This, later, disappeared, and the
spandrel had only a matted surface, in contrast to the rest of the
dial. This in turn disappeared when the dial departed from its former
glory of a silvered hour circle and became a sheet of iron painted
according to taste. We give examples of this--the Sussex dial depicting
the iron works (p. 243) and the provincial style with the lunette
painted with a figure subject (p. 249). The end of the story is the
china dial of the painted Hindeloopen Dutch clocks beloved of our
childhood, with weights and chains and other pleasing mechanism. Here
the nineteenth century Dutch clock joins hands with the old wall clock
of the seventeenth century, Dame Fashion having pirouetted round the
dial, trifling with all collectors in "the whirligig of time."
=The Evolution of the Hands.=--The early examples of the long-case
clock or of the lantern clock with one hand show a fine rich design
in metal-work in the hand itself. It was brass, often gilded, or iron
wrought with great skill and beauty. At the advent of the minute hand
it was made in character with its fellow. At first the dial had a
_fleur-de-lis_, and later a slightly more floriated use of this emblem
on the hour circle between each hour. In old examples the hand, when it
came opposite this decoration, was in keeping with the _fleur-de-lis_
as though it were part of the design of the hand. It is only a fancy,
but, as no design comes by accident, it is very probable that such was
the idea of the old dial engraver.
The study of hands is exceptionally interesting; they run through a
regular series of styles, as varied as the ornamentation of the cases.
Some of the designs are of exquisite balance as specimens of delicate
metal-work, in which the English have always been proficient. Their
character can be gauged by the expert clockmaker or connoisseur to such
a nicety that it can be seen at once if the clock has its original
hands or not. Those of my readers who wish to pursue this subject will
find the hands adequately treated and well illustrated in _English
Domestic Clocks_, by Mr. Herbert Cesinsky and Mr. Malcolm R. Webster, a
volume which no student of clocks should fail to consult as a practical
and authoritative work.
In regard to hands, it is curious that the fashion of placing a minute
hand to travel around the dial with the hour hand has established a
method of reckoning time in a popular manner not in accordance with
scientific exactitude. The eye glances at the dial and sees that the
minute hand has so many minutes to travel _before_ reaching the next
hour. We accordingly say, for instance, it is twenty minutes to four
or ten minutes to four. On one half of the dial we have acted quite
scientifically in saying it is ten minutes past three or half-past
three, but the moment the point of the half hour is reached we act in
a different manner. We never speak or think of four thirty-five, four
forty, or four fifty, unless we have to consult the railway time-table.
This all comes about by reason of the minute hand being placed as it
is. In clocks with the minute hand having a separate dial of its own
no such unscientific error would have arisen. The second hand in such
clocks travels around the dial and points outside the hour numerals.
CHAPTER VII
THE BRACKET CLOCK
The term "bracket clock" a misnomer--The great series of English
table or mantel clocks--The evolution of styles--Their competition
with French elaboration.
Long-case clocks came into being when the long or "royal" pendulum
required protection by having a wooden case. It was possible to have
a short pendulum, and clocks intended for table use had a short
pendulum. The long pendulum swings exactly in a second, and for it to
do this it must be of a certain length, determined by physical laws
followed according to mechanical formulæ by the scientific clockmaker,
too complex to be given here in detail. It may be interesting to
record that the length of a seconds pendulum--that is, one requiring
one second to move from extreme to extreme--is 39.1398 inches in
the latitude of Greenwich and is of different lengths in differing
latitudes.
=The Term "Bracket Clock" a Misnomer.=--In the old form of clock--the
brass lantern type, weight-driven--it is obvious that when the weights
and chains were suspended below the case the clock could not stand on
a table. Such clocks had to hang on a wall, as so many old engravings
show, or they were placed on a bracket against a wall, with the
weights hanging beneath. With the advent of the pendulum new theories
were in the air. At its first use as a short pendulum it was placed
in front of the dial. When the seconds pendulum was recognized as a
scientific regulator, the length precluded clocks in which it was
employed being used as table clocks. It was a distinct departure from
miniature timepieces as decorative domestic ornaments. Scientific it
undoubtedly was, and as such it commenced a new development in the
direction of astronomical clocks and scientific regulators of time. The
table clock had to pursue another course. It belongs to another school
of mechanism. The weight-driven clock strove to arrive at exactitude
and scientific accuracy. The other clock, like the watch, attempted
economy of space in conjunction with the maximum of exactitude such
economy would allow. It essayed to fulfil certain conditions. It was
easily portable, it could stand on a table, or more often on the
mantelpiece, a place it can almost claim as its own in the English home
by tradition. The watch with similar aims taxed the art of the maker
to enable it to be easily carried on the person. These two classes of
timepiece, the portable clock and more readily portable watch, were
spring-driven. The development of this mechanical principle, running
parallel with the evolution of the weight-driven clock, arrived at
great scientific accuracy, as exemplified by the nautical chronometer
and by the modern machine-made watch, whose timekeeping qualities are
remarkable. In fact, it may be said that the table or portable clock
and the watch together have dethroned the weight-driven clock as a
domestic clock.
[Illustration: BRACKET CLOCKS. LATE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
Maker, Sam Watson (Coventry). Date, 1687.
Height, 12 in. Width, 9-1/4 in. Depth, 6-3/4 in.
Maker, Joseph Knibb (Oxon). Date, 1690.
Height, 12 in. Width, 8 in. Depth, 5 in.
(_By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq._)]
[Illustration: BRACKET CLOCKS. EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
Maker, Thomas Loomes, at Ye Mermaid in Lothbury.
Date, 1700.
Height, 1 ft. 3-1/2 in. Width, 11-1/2 in. Depth, 7-1/4 in.
Maker, Thomas Johnson, Gray's Inn Passage.
Date, about 1730.
Height, 1 ft. 2 in. Width, 7 in. Depth, 5 in.]
=The Great Series of English Table or Mantel Clocks.=--To the beginner
the appearance of an old table clock has not the same enticement as
a brass lantern clock with its obvious claim to pre-modern form.
It may even be said that the tyro clings reverently to his worship
of the "grandfather" clock as something sacred. With their steady,
uninterrupted progress from the middle seventeenth century for two
hundred years, it is remarkable how conservative these table clocks
have been to a comparatively fixed form. They stand in solidarity of
workmanship and perfection of mechanical detail as exhibiting the
superlative character of English clockmaking. During that period, in
long procession, generation after generation, they have upheld the
dignity of the science of horology as practised by English clockmakers,
whose craftsmanship and perfection of exact detail deservedly won a
reputation on the Continent and in America. An English clock of the
finest period holds few superiors and very few equals in the world for
reliability and exactitude. "_Bajo la palabra de un Inglés_" (On the
word of an Englishman) is a proverbial saying in the Spanish States
of South America, and such an honourable appellation can equally be
applied to the said Englishman's clock, upon which great clockmakers
have proudly inscribed their names as guarantee of its fidelity and
truth.
From Thomas Tompion in the days of Charles II to Benjamin Vulliamy
in the days of George IV the series has been unbroken. We find table
clocks by all the leading makers of long-case clocks, so that whatever
competition lay between the principles of the one and the principles
of the other was confined to the workshop of the clockmaker who set
himself to master the intricacies of two styles. It was a friendly
rivalry which is found to exist in other fields of human action.
Disraeli the politician wrote novels; Macaulay the historian published
verse; Seymour Haden laid down his lancet as a doctor to take up the
etching-needle to become one of the greatest modern etchers.
=The Evolution of Styles.=--In the examples illustrated, the slow
progression of types slightly differing from each other is readily
seen. The late seventeenth century exhibits types of reticent form,
with ebonized case, and having a brass basket-top decoration surmounted
by a handle showing its use as a portable clock. This handle is
retained in the carriage clock of to-day--a clock which finds a
prototype in the carriage clock of Marie Antoinette. In height these
clocks were about 12 inches and in width about 9 inches. At this
period brass oblong ornaments were affixed to the case, a detail which
disappeared with the next later type.
[Illustration: BRACKET CLOCKS. MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
Maker, John Page (Ipswich). Date, 1740.
Height, 24 in, Width, 12-1/4 in. Depth, 5-1/4 in.
Maker, Godfrey Poy (London). Date, 1745.
Height, 26 in. Width, 11 in. Depth, 6-3/4.
(_By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq._)]
[Illustration: BRACKET CLOCKS. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (ABOUT 1760).
Maker, Johnson (London).
Height, 1 ft. 5 in. Width, 9-1/4 in. Depth, 5-1/4 in.
Maker, Thomas Hill (Fleet Street, London).
Height, 1 ft. 9 in. Width, 1 ft. Depth, 7 in.]
The clock on the left (illustrated p. 181) is by Sam Watson, of
Coventry, and is dated 1687. It has the basket top, reminiscent in
decorative treatment of the metal fret found in lantern brass clocks
of contemporary date. It will be observed that these clocks have two
hands. The spandrels of this and the adjacent clock have the single
cherub's-head brass ornament. The latter clock, on the right, is by
Joseph Knibb, of Oxford, and is in date 1690. The basket decoration is
absent and the top is of simpler form. These two examples indicate that
fine work was done in the provinces. By the end of the reign of William
III the table clock had grown taller. The example illustrated (p. 183),
by Thomas Loomes, is 15-1/2 inches high and 11-1/2 inches wide. It
will be noticed that the basket top was still being made, and from now
onwards the four turned brass terminals at the top became a feature and
lasted for a century. By the first quarter of the eighteenth century
a lunette had been added, as shown in the clock on the same page by
Thomas Johnson, in date 1730. From this date feet were almost always
employed. Similar feet embellished the long clock-case from a slightly
later period throughout the century, and are still in evidence in
examples made as late as the first half of the nineteenth century. In
the 1730 clock by Thomas Johnson, the only brass ornament on the case
is the escutcheon to the lock, a feature which, as time went on, lost
its prominence and became more reticent.
In the reign of George II the clock again grew in stature. Its
portability was evidently not a necessity. It cannot be now said to
resemble a carriage clock. Chamber clocks became definite objects of
decorative utility as part of the domestic fitments of a room. The
architectural ornament becomes pronounced, and there is a massive
grandeur about the cases which suited the early Georgian mansions and
Hogarthian furniture of the period. These eight-day striking and alarum
clocks had become a feature of the English home. The fine provincial
example by John Page, of Ipswich, is 24 inches high and 12-1/4 inches
wide. In addition to the four terminals there is a fifth at the apex on
a column with supporting metal ornament. The adjacent clock by Godfrey
Poy, in date 1745, has at the apex a small figure of Ajax. In both
these examples there are rings at the side as ornaments, or possibly
for use to lift the clock in lieu of the older style of the handle at
the top (p. 187).
In the reign of George III (1760-1820) the table clock shows greater
variety. It was a restless time, filled with wars and political
struggles--a reign notable for the American Declaration of Independence
on 4th July 1776, for the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789,
for the "darkest hour in English history," the planned invasion of
England by French and Spanish fleets, and contemplated invasion of
Ireland by the Dutch fleet. In this reign, too, there came what may be
termed the industrial revolution due to the introduction of machinery
and steam-power. The growing wealth of the middle classes demanded
more luxurious furniture. Merchants and manufacturers, shipowners and
traders with India and the East, Lancashire cotton-spinners and
mill-owners founded a new plutocracy. Bristol and Liverpool traders
in "blackbirds," as the iniquitous slave trade was impiously termed,
amassed fortunes. Although Pitt advocated the emancipation of slaves,
under his rule "the English slave trade more than doubled."
[Illustration: AMERICAN CLOCK.
With case of fine design in form of lyre, richly gilded and surmounted
by eagle.
Makers, Savin & Dyer (Boston). 1780-1800.
(_By courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York._)]
[Illustration: STAFFORDSHIRE COPPER LUSTRE WARE VASE.
With decoration in Chinese style, blue and white, and painted clock
dial with no works. Early nineteenth century. The cottager's desire to
possess a mantel clock satisfied.
(_In collection of author._)]
Two George III clocks, in date 1760, by Johnson and by Thomas Hill, are
illustrated (p. 189). One shows the recurrence of an old form with the
handle at the top of the case, having only as a new feature delicate
brackets--a female bust, suggesting in miniature the figure-head of
some Indiaman. It is a pleasant ornament one would like to have seen
more often adopted. The adjacent clock, by Thomas Hill, evidently
derives its design from France, and is a forerunner, in its departure
from the square case, of the style which Sheraton, in his adaptation
from the French, made at a later date.
=Competition with French Elaboration.=--During the latter decades of
the eighteenth and the opening years of the nineteenth centuries,
the influx of French fashions had a considerable influence on the
furniture designers of this country. What Chippendale had commenced,
Sheraton continued, each according to his point of view. So great was
the effect that there is actually an English Empire period entirely
dependent on the classic interpretation of the French school. To treat
of French clocks would occupy a space that is denied in this outline
study of English work. But that they are of paramount importance
cannot be denied. The French craftsman, as he always did, realized the
possibilities of his subject. His cases are elaborate and imaginative
in conception. His fertility of invention is remarkable. On the whole
it must be admitted that the case is the weakest part of the English
clock. The case-maker never quite realized his opportunities. He might
have done so much better. There is a stability and solid, almost
stolid, soberness that might have been lightened, so one thinks at
times. But on the other hand, when the Frenchman is bad in design, his
exuberance of ornament and headstrong imagination seem too lurid for a
sober clock which only records ordinary time.
This French influence was world-wide. By the courtesy of the
authorities of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, an American
clock is illustrated (p. 193), the makers being Savin and Dyer, of
Boston. This is in date 1780 to 1800. It is of fine proportions, and
the lyre ornament is kept in due reticence.
As exemplifying the far-reaching effect that French design had on this
country, we reproduce an interesting illustration of a cottager's
clock of the early nineteenth century (p. 195). It is really a vase of
earthenware made in Staffordshire. On one side is painted in blue a
Chinese scene, on the other is a clock-face in imitation of a French
dial. But the hands perpetually mark seventeen minutes past eight. In
copper lustre-ware this vase with its sham dial served the cottager
as something ornamental, although not useful. It is a replica in
homely English earthenware of French _finesse_, a cottage echo of
the vase-clocks of Sèvres in the apartments at Versailles. The
cottager's desire to have a clock was satisfied by the Staffordshire
potter.
[Illustration: BRACKET CLOCKS. LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
Maker, Alexander Cumming (London).
Date, 1770.
Height, 1 ft. 2 in. Width, 8-1/4 in. Depth, 5-1/4 in.
No maker's name. Date, about 1800.
Height, 1 ft. 3-3/4 in. Width, 10-1/2 in. Depth, 6-1/4 in.
(_By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq._)]
[Illustration: BRACKET CLOCKS. EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY. DATE, ABOUT
1805.
Maker, Barraud (London).
Height, 17 in. Width, 12 in. Depth, 6 in.
Maker, Strowbridge (Dawlish).
Height, 16 in. Width, 10 in. Depth, 6-1/2 in.]
Many clocks of the last quarter of the eighteenth century show the
lingering styles of the earlier decades. It is impossible to lay down
any definite rule in furniture, in silver, or in old clocks, that in
such a year a certain style ends. Approximately, one may determine
periods and by close application discover slight indications of new
styles beginning to take the town. Now and again one comes across
examples a great many years behind the time, especially in provincial
makers, where fashions in cases were not so frequently changed.
Illustrated on p. 199 are two clocks; one, in date 1770, by Alexander
Cumming, is only 14 inches in height; the other, 1800, having no
maker's name, is 15-3/4 inches high. A new and very pleasing form
is introduced. We see the dial in process of losing its lunette.
It makes its ascent on the case to take its place as in later
styles. This raising of the dial affected the top of the case, which
became of circular form. The transitional period is shown by the
ornament remaining in the right-hand clock in the lower spandrels.
The case-maker had not quite assimilated the changing form. It is
interesting to note that in both these clocks the handles of the early
portable clock are reintroduced.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the circular dial had
become established. An interesting transitional clock by Barraud (p.
201), in date 1805, shows that the case-maker was averse to parting
with the lunette. He accordingly places the dial in the centre of the
case and has a crescent-shaped ornament, with a design adapted by the
metal-worker from the Chinese potter. Of the same date is a provincial
clock by Strowbridge, of Dawlish. Here the maker has boldly adopted the
circular top, and the result is a case of pleasing proportions.
Restlessness of design characterized this period. The old square
dial was rarely if ever used. The arched-top case is another form,
as illustrated (p. 205), where the maker, Biddell, refrained from
following the line of the circular dial in his case. The adjacent
example, in date 1800 to 1815, shows the circular dial surmounting the
pediment of the case. After its vicissitudes it has at length triumphed
in becoming the dominant note in the design.
As illustrating the varied attempts to make the table clock an imposing
ornament and deal with its decoration in an elaborate manner, the fine
clock in ebony case inlaid with blue and white Wedgwood medallions is
a remarkable example (illustrated p. 207). An especially noteworthy
feature in this clock is the beaded ornamentation around the dial and
the medallions and the other portions of the case of cut steel.
The series of table clocks illustrated should indicate to the reader
the salient features of such clocks, which are sought after by
collectors and carefully prized by those who love the fine work of the
old English clockmakers.
[Illustration: BRACKET CLOCKS.
Maker, Biddell (London). Date, 1800. Enamel dial.
Height, 1 ft. 8 in. Width, 10 in. Depth, 5-1/2 in.
No name of maker. Date, 1810-15.
Height, 1 ft. 7-3/4 in. Width, 1 ft. Depth, 5-1/2 in.]
[Illustration: EBONY TABLE CLOCK.
Inlaid with medallions of blue and white Wedgwood jasper ware. Enriched
with mounted ornament of cut steel.
(_By courtesy of City of Nottingham Museum and Art Gallery._)]
CHAPTER VIII
PROVINCIAL CLOCKS
Their character--Names of clockmakers found on clocks
in the provinces--The North of England: Newcastle-upon-
Tyne--Yorkshire clockmakers: Halifax and the district--Liverpool
and the district--The Midlands--The Home Counties--The West
Country--Miscellaneous makers.
A great deal of attention has been paid by collectors to clocks by
well-known London makers and too little examination has been given to
fine examples by those of the provinces. In the present chapter an
attempt is made to fill a hiatus in this respect, and by the kindness
of those interested in the various localities certain data are
presented which may stimulate the student to continue his researches on
the lines here indicated.
The metropolis attracted noteworthy makers, but they had their origin
and often their early training in the provinces.
The following are among the great London clockmakers, but they were
not Londoners. They come from all parts of the country. Joseph Knibb
(about 1670) was an Oxfordshire man. The famous Thomas Tompion,
born in 1638, came from Bedfordshire. George Graham (1673-1751)
tramped to London from Cumberland. Thomas Earnshaw, who perfected the
marine chronometer, his additions being still in use, was born at
Ashton-under-Lyne in 1750 and served his apprenticeship there. Henry
Jones, who was the pupil of Edward East, was the son of a vicar at
Southampton. Charles II had a clock made by him. Thomas Mudge was
the son of a schoolmaster and was born at Exeter in 1715. Another
Exeter man was Jacob Lovelace, who took over thirty years to construct
a remarkable clock. The celebrated John Harrison was the son of a
carpenter on an estate at Pontefract. It was he who competed for the
Government gratuity offered for a nautical timekeeper, for which he
finally received £10,000, after repeated tests in voyages to the West
Indies by himself and his son. We think of his early struggles, when he
travelled up to London after he was forty, only to find that he had to
return to the provinces and continue his vocation as clock-mender in
ordinary and inventor extraordinary. There is a long-case clock with
wooden wheels and pinions by him in the Guildhall Museum, London.
The list is by no means complete. There was John Ellicott, who was born
at Bodmin, and another Cornishman from the same town is John Arnold,
who was apprenticed to his father, a watchmaker there. Arnold continued
what Harrison had begun in the chronometer. We must not exclude the
great Dr. Hooke, who was born at Freshwater, Isle of Wight, who
invented the anchor escapement for clocks and contested the invention
of the balance spring in watches with Huygens.
=Names of Clockmakers found on Clocks in the Provinces.=--It has
been suggested that in some cases the name of a local maker does not
necessarily determine, when found on the dial or elsewhere, that such
clock has been made by the person whose name it bears. It has also been
advanced that the name of the owner was sometimes put on the dial.
This last theory can be dismissed as being of so infrequent use as
to be practically negligible in recording lists of makers. The other
conjecture may possibly have sufficient truth in it to disconcert
collectors of examples of local crafts. Of course, it is a statement
that cannot be proved, nor can it be disproved. Presumably a clockmaker
in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when clockmaking was
something more than selling or mending clocks that other people made,
did not deliberately set up business and, in a small town where secrecy
was impossible, make a practice of putting his name on work he did not
execute. That he did not make all the parts himself is admitted. Had
he done so, he would have had to be a chain-maker or a catgut-maker, a
pulley-maker, a chaser of metal for his dials, a cabinet-maker for his
cases, and so on down to his most minute screws. One might as well take
similar objection to Sir Joshua Reynolds or Gainsborough that they did
not extract their pigments from the natural vegetables or minerals,
that they neglected to become proficient in manipulating hogs'
bristles or camel-hair into brushes, or that they could not and did not
make their own canvases or carve their own frames.
It did happen that an old clock by one maker was sent to another for
repair, and he made such extensive repairs to the movement that he
felt himself justified in putting his own name to the clock in its new
state. The owner would have had something to say to this interchange
of names had there not been some justification for it. This practice,
however, is not confined to the provinces, and we cannot charge the
provincial maker with being wholly unscrupulous.
Some purists in collecting have objected to the presence of a country
maker's name stencilled on the dial, as being evidence it was not his
handiwork. But this is not in itself a crime. It is far more likely
that such a clock is of local make, and that being in a remote part it
was not easy to get anyone to paint his name on the dial or engrave
it. Had he had it made to order in a town surely his name would have
been painted for him. In a measure, crudities of this nature and
peculiarities not found in clocks from the great centres are hallmarks
of genuineness.
At the time of the passing of the Act in 1797 relating to the taxation
of clocks and watches, the following places sent representatives to
London to protest against this tax:--
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Liverpool, Leicester, Derby, Bristol, Prescot,
Coventry, and Edinburgh. Of these, Prescot (a few miles from
Liverpool) and Coventry represented the watch industry. We may
therefore fairly conclude that the other places represent the most
noteworthy centres of clockmaking at that period.
=The North of England: Newcastle-upon-Tyne.=--In regard to provincial
makers, one wonders what 'prentice hands have gone to the making of the
long cases. Did Thomas Chippendale, when he was working at his father's
bench at Worcester, execute any of his early joinery and carving to
embellish now forgotten clocks? Who can say? At Newcastle-upon-Tyne
we are on surer foundation, for it is on record that Thomas Bewick,
the wood-engraver, was apprenticed to Ralph Beilby, an engraver at
Newcastle, on 1st October 1767 for seven years. His master's business
lay in engraving crests and initials on watch seals, teaspoons,
sugar-tongs, and other pieces of plate, and the numerals and ornaments
on clock dials, together with the maker's name. Here, then, was young
Bewick's 'prentice work--the master of white line on the wood block.
Later, Bewick confessed to a friend that when engraving these clock
dials his hands grew as hard as a blacksmith's, and almost disgusted
him with engraving. At any rate, there is the strong probability that
such Newcastle dials engraved by Thomas Bewick are on clocks of the
date from 1763 to 1774.
The following list of names of Newcastle and other clockmakers in the
North of England is produced by the kindness of C. Leo Reid, Esq., of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and by the permission of the proprietors of the
_Newcastle Weekly Chronicle_, compiled from notes appearing in that
valuable repository of North-country antiquities.
The makers are of Newcastle, unless otherwise stated. The list is
arranged alphabetically.
John Airey (Hexham), 1790-95.
Jas. Atkinson (Gateshead), 1770-77.
Joseph Atkinson (Gateshead), 1790-1804.
Beilly and Hawthorn, 1780.
William Berry (Gateshead), 1810.
Thomas Bell, 1785.
John Bolton (Chester-le-Street), 1812; (Durham), 1812-21.
S. Boverick, 1765.
William Coventry, 1778.
William Featherstone, 1790-95.
William Fenton, 1778.
William Foggin, 1833 (clock-dial maker).
Gibson, 1750.
John Greaves, 1780-95.
Thomas Greaves, 1778-95.
John Harrison, 1790-95.
John Hawthorn, 1780.
W. Heron, 1790.
Geo. Hidspeth, 1800.
J. Hutchinson, 1811.
Matt. Kirkup, 1811.
Jos. Ledgard, 1707-32.
Richard Marshall (Wolsingham), 1796.
Geo. Miller (Gateshead), 1770.
Sam Ogden, 1760-70.
Ord (Hexham), 1797.
Jno. Peacock, 1800.
John Rawson, 1790.
Wm. Rawson, 1790.
{ Christian Ker Reid, 1778-1834.
{ St. Nicholas Churchyard, close to workshop of Thomas Bewick.
{ Reid and Son, 1817.
{ Reid and Sons, 1845 to present day.
Henry Sanders (Gateshead), 1800.
John Scott (Sandgate), 1790-95.
Thomas Smoult, 1790.
{ Hugh Stockell, 1790.
{ Stockell and Stuart, 1798.
{ Hugh Stockell, 1800.
Archibald Strachan, 1790.
William Tickle, sen., 1790-95.
William Tickle, jun., 1790-95.
J. H. Wakefield (Gateshead), 1800.
John Wakefield (Lamesley), 1827.
Ward, 1811.
Michael Watson, 1811-27.
Thomas Weatherley (Berwick-on-Tweed), 1790-95.
John Weatherston, 1790-95.
John Wilson, 1782-90.
Richard Young, 1811.
In regard to the remarks about Thomas Bewick and clock dials, there is
every likelihood that his 'prentice work in engraving them between
1763 and 1774 is to be found on clocks by S. Boverick, William
Coventry, William Fenton, Gibson, John Hawthorn, John Wilson, and
Christian K. Reid; the latter maker certainly knew Bewick. The dates
given in the above list do not definitely represent that the maker's
work was confined to that period exclusively. They are approximate
dates.
=Yorkshire Clockmakers: Halifax and the District.=--We have already
seen that John Harrison, the great self-taught genius, born in 1683,
was a Yorkshireman. Of early makers there is a record of John Ogden,
of Bowrigg, of the late seventeenth century, and Samuel Ogden, born at
Sowerby in 1669. The name of Ogden is found on many Yorkshire clocks.
Thomas Ogden came to Halifax; although the Ogdens seem to have been a
Quaker family, one of his clocks is in the Unitarian Chapel vestry. The
Ogden type of dial with the phases of the moon, although not original,
being adapted from Dutch models, became noteworthy in the North of
England, and such styles were termed "Halifax" clocks. Samuel Ogden,
a descendant, migrated to Newcastle-upon-Tyne (see list, p. 216),
perpetuating the name a hundred years after.
In Halifax parish churchyard is a tombstone to the memory of R.
Duckworth, clockmaker, 1677.
John Mason was a maker about 1760, and his father, Timothy Mason, was
a clockmaker before him. At Rotherham some years ago there were some
Mason clocks on exhibition, and there were eight generations of Masons
as clockmakers, the later branch having settled at Rotherham. Such is
the record of many provincial makers.
Emanuel Hopperton, of Leeds, made clocks with marquetry cases. One bore
the proud motto, _Non mihi sed mundo._
Henry Brownhill, of Briggate, Leeds, watchmaker and clockmaker, was
sufficiently prosperous to issue several tons of halfpenny copper
tokens in 1793. By the courtesy of S. H. Hamer, Esq., of Halifax, an
illustration of one of these tokens is given.
[Illustration: HALFPENNY, 1793.]
This was the year when the Reign of Terror began and when Marie
Antoinette was executed. In England great commercial distress was felt.
Banks issued notes in excess of their capital. Gold was scarce, and the
Bank of England restricted its issues. A panic ensued and several banks
failed. Pitt issued Exchequer Bills to the extent of five millions.
Other local clockmakers are Thomas Liston, of Luddenden, 1718-79,
and his son Thomas, of Halifax, 1745-1815. It is reported that this
latter Thomas Lister travelled by coach from Halifax to London to
regulate and keep in order the clock at St. Paul's Cathedral. There is
an orrery by him in the Glasgow University Museum.
[Illustration: LONG CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Gilbert Chippindale (Halifax).
ENLARGEMENT OF HOOD.
Showing fine fretwork and maker's name in lunette.
(_By courtesy of Surgeon-Major W. Savile Henderson._)]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE EIGHT-DAY CLOCK.
Maker, John Weatherilt (Liverpool).
Date, 1780-85.
(_Reproduced by courtesy of George H. Hewitt, Esq., J.P._)]
William Lister is another member of the same family who made long-case
clocks. In his dials a noticeable feature is the absence of the hour
circle as being separate from the rest of the plate. The dial was made
in one piece and attached to a back-plate of brass.
Pattison, another Yorkshire maker, made long-case clocks similar to
those of William Lister.
John Hartley, of Halifax, about 1770, was the maker of a thirty-hour
grandfather clock in oak case with brass square dial and moon and date
lunettes. Titus Bancroft, of Sowerby Bridge, 1822, a church-clock
maker, also made grandfather clocks.
John Hallifax, of Barnsley, who died in 1750, made a fine long-case
clock now at Wentworth House.
Gilbert Chippindale, of Halifax, 1781, is another maker of fine clocks.
A fine example of his work is illustrated (p. 219).
R. Henderson, of Scarborough, early eighteenth century, is another
Yorkshire maker. Richard Midgley, 1720-40, of Halifax, made a number of
clocks still treasured locally. Samuel Pearson is known about 1790, and
John Stancliffe, of Bark-island, is another local maker.
Collectors have too frequently associated Yorkshire clocks with the
later periods, with ponderous cases of gigantic size, but, as is
shown, the Yorkshire makers are worthy of considerable attention by
connoisseurs as having a lineage extending back into the periods when
clockmaking was at its best, and when the case-maker was not such a
preponderating factor as he seems to have been in the early nineteenth
century days in the North.
=Liverpool and the District.=--In regard to Liverpool and the vicinity,
at the Tercentenary Historical Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery
in 1907 a collection of clocks and watches was made to illustrate the
art of the clockmaker in that part of the country. By the kindness
of George H. Hewitt, Esq., J.P., who arranged these exhibits, we are
enabled to supply the names of many of the Liverpool clockmakers.
Peter Litherland patented the rack lever escapement in 1793-4 which
Robert Roskell, the Liverpool maker, introduced into his watches. At
the above Exhibition was shown a pendulum watch by George Taylor, about
1700, and one by William Tarleton, 1797, with the Government stamp
indicating that the tax of a guinea had been paid. This was in 1797,
the first and only year when a tax on watches and clocks was levied.
One remembers the fine portrait of Colonel Tarleton in uniform, with
one foot on a cannon, after the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, signed
I. Johnson, on a Liverpool mug. He was the Member of Parliament for
Liverpool from 1790 to 1812. This family gave the name to Tarleton
Street, Liverpool.
That Liverpool and the district was renowned for its watches is shown
by a silver watch made by Thomas Worsley, Liverpool, inscribed,
"Presented to Robert Burns by his brother ploughmen of Air (_sic_)
March 9, 1785." Among other makers at Liverpool whose names are found
on watches are Fair-clough (about 1800), Edmonds (about 1770), Joseph
Finney (about 1770), Robert Roskell (about 1800), M. J. Tobias & Co.
(1820), Harrington (1790), Peter Hope (1795), J. Johnson (1796).
[Illustration: LONG-CASE EIGHT-DAY CLOCK.
Maker, Thurston Lassell (Toxteth Park, Liverpool).
Date, about 1745.
(_Reproduced by courtesy of George H. Hewitt, Esq., J.P._)]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE MAHOGANY EIGHT-DAY CLOCK.
Maker, Henry Higginbotham (Macclesfield).
The Gothic panel in door is a noticeable feature.
(_By courtesy of A. Bromley Sanders, Esq., Exeter._)]
It is possible that some of these makers also made long-case and
other clocks; we find the name of Roskell on a long-case clock and R.
Roskell on another. Presumably this was the Robert Roskell who used
the Litherland rack-lever watch escapement. Joseph Finney also made
long-case clocks. Other makers' names found on Liverpool clocks are
Burges, Aspinall (with the motto, "Time is valuable"), Jno. Weatherilt.
This clock is illustrated (p. 221). It indicates by the character of
its marquetry in the panel of the door and in the base that it belongs
to the second period of marquetry contemporary with the influence of
Sheraton. In the lunette the phases of the moon are shown. The date of
this is about 1780 to 1785. Another clock, illustrated on p. 225, is
by Thurston Lassell, Toxteth Park, Liverpool. This in date is about
1745. The phases of the moon are shown in the lunette. The case is of
more slender proportions than its fellow. The hood exhibits a reticence
which was lost in later examples, especially in provincial work made in
Yorkshire, where the case became of unwieldy size and somewhat ungainly
shape.
Other names of Liverpool makers found on long-case clocks are William
Sutton, Harrison & Son, Jas. Canson, Thomas Saxon, Jo^n Taylor
(Ormskirk), W. Lassell, Toxteth Park, Liverpool, with motto, "Time
shows the Way of Life's Decay," with brass face, lunar movement, and
monthly dial with indicator. (This style of dial is a feature of a
Shropshire clock illustrated p. 249.) Brown, Liverpool, is found on
a mahogany long-case clock and also on a small long-case clock. To
those who are interested the portrait in oils of Peter Litherland, the
inventor of the rack lever, who died in 1804, is in the possession of
the Corporation of Liverpool.
Among other Lancashire makers the following are noteworthy: T. Lees
(Bury), 1795-1800; Archibald Coats (Wigan), 1780; Barr (Bolton), 1790;
James Barlow (Oldham), 1775; Benjamin Barlow (Ashton-under-Lyne), 1780;
and Nathaniel Brown (Manchester), 1780-1785.
In Westmorland and Cumberland the names Burton, of Kendal, and Russell,
of Carlisle, are often found on grandfather clocks of local manufacture
of the late eighteenth century.
In regard to a particular style of case associated with Lancashire and
with Cheshire, having the door decorated with panel in Gothic style,
two examples are illustrated (p. 227), one by Henry Higginbotham
(Macclesfield), and the other by Heywood, Northwich, 1790 (p. 231).
[Illustration: LONG-CASE MAHOGANY EIGHT-DAY CLOCK.
Maker, Heywood (Northwich, Cheshire). 1790.
The Gothic panel in door is a noticeable feature.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons._)]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE EIGHT-DAY CLOCK.
With dial showing days of month. Oak case veneered in mahogany.
Maker, Thomas Wall (Birmingham). Date, about 1795.
(_In possession of author._)]
=Clockmakers of the Midlands.=--As typical of the fine work produced,
the bracket clock by Sam Watson, of Coventry, 1687, illustrated (p.
181), shows that the provincial maker was at that date in no way on a
lower plane than his contemporary in London. Other makers are Wilson
(Warwick), 1709; John Whitehurst (Derby), 1785--a fine long-case
clock by this maker is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; W.
Francis (Birmingham), and Thomas Wall (Birmingham), 1798. An example
by this maker is illustrated (p. 233), exhibiting a pastoral scene
painted in the lunette of the dial. This clock--in the possession of
the author--keeps excellent time although 120 years old, and has gone
for ten years without stopping.
Of Nottingham makers, the following names of early craftsmen are found
on watches: Isaac Alexander, about 1760 (a watch, gold inner case,
white dial; outer case of shagreen, with portrait of Charles Stuart
by J. June, 1745), and Thomas Hudson, about 1790 (silver, white dial;
outer case of tortoiseshell, with silver mounts). The name of Hen.
Page, Upper Broughton (Notts), is found on a brass clock, and John
Kirk was a maker at Epperstone and Skegby before he came to London in
1677 and was admitted as a member of the Clockmakers' Company. Among
the collection of watches at Nottingham Museum, apart from the two
above-mentioned, are a good many by makers of a later date, mainly of
the early nineteenth century: John Lingford, A. Shepperley, William
Young--all of Nottingham, and Geo. Stacey, Worksop.
Among the other watches on exhibition are an early one by Robert Dent
(Lincoln), No. 61, and a watch with gold case with chased _repoussé_
figures and ornament by J. Windmills, the celebrated London maker,
1671-1700.
This short list of Midland makers is obviously incomplete, and it is
to be hoped that some painstaking horologists will amplify it and do
honour to the makers and to the counties concerned.
=The Home Counties.=--Thomas Tompion (1671-1713), the famous London
maker, commenced at Bedford and ended at Bath. We have seen a brass
lantern clock engraved "Thos. Tonkink de Bedforde." This might very
well be one of his early clocks, and we know his great last triumph in
the famous long-case clock in the Pump Room at Bath. But apart from
this incidental connection of the "father of English watchmaking" with
the provinces, there stands Joseph Knibb, of Oxon, who was admitted to
the Clockmakers' Company of London in 1677. He worked in London for
the Court of Charles II. But he was established in Oxfordshire, as is
shown by the copper token he issued, with inscription "Joseph Knibb
Clockmaker in Oxon," and on reverse the dial of a clock with initials
I.K. in centre. We give an illustration of this token.
[Illustration]
A long-case eight-day clock finely decorated in marquetry, in date
about 1690, is illustrated (p. 237). This exhibits the work of Knibb
as being equal, as his employment at the Court shows, to the leading
London makers of his day. In the chapter on Marquetry, p. 79, will be
found a notice of this clock in regard to its relation to other
styles of marquetry, and its place in the sequence there described.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE EIGHT-DAY CLOCK.
Decorated in marquetry.
Maker, Joseph Knibb (Oxon). Date about 1690.]
[Illustration: GEORGIAN SPANISH MAHOGANY LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Hood enriched with fretwork in Chinese style of Chippendale. Terminals
of carved mahogany.
Maker, Cockey (Warminster).
(_By courtesy of Messrs. D. Sherratt & Co., Chester._)]
A fine bracket clock by Joseph Knibb, in date about 1690, is
illustrated (p. 181). This is of the same period as the long-case
clock, the year when William of Orange defeated James II at the battle
of the Boyne, and James, the last of the Stuarts, fled into France.
It is possible that the fortunes of Joseph Knibb were bound up with
Whitehall. At the Revolution in 1689 our Court clockmaker no doubt
retreated into Oxfordshire to continue his creations which we now know.
A cloud of unpaid debts must have hung over him, for the Stuarts were
bad paymasters.
=The West Country.=--In publishing lists of clockmakers collected
by local antiquaries, a loyal service has been rendered to the West
Country by the _Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries_. The following
list is based on the researches published in that journal by R.
Pearse-Chope, Esq.,[4] and by H. Tapley-Soper, Esq.[5]
Balle, John (Exeter).
Bickle, R. H. (Bishop's Nympton).
Bradford (Tiverton).
Bradford (Drayford).
Braund, John (Hatherleigh).
Brayley and Street (Bridgwater).
Bucknell, Jas. (Crediton).
Chamberlain, Hen. (Tiverton).
Chasty, Robert (Hatherleigh).
Chasty, William (Teignmouth).
Day, Christopher (South Molton).
Drake, R. (Beaminster).
Eastcott, Richard (Exon).
Edward, Clement, c. 1671.
Ezekiel (Exon), c. 1794.
Follet (Sidmouth).
Foster, James (Ashburton).
Fox, John (Alverton).
Gard, Henry (Exeter).
Gard, William (Exeter).
Gaydon, J. (Barnstaple).
Gould (Bishop's Nympton).
Gould, G. (South Molton).
Harding, Charles (Sidmouth).
Harner (Membury).
Hayward, Peter (Crediton), _c._ 1766.
Howard, Wm., 1760.
Hutchins, William (Cullompton).
Huxtable (Chittlehampton).
Huxtable, E. (South Molton).
Jacobs, A. (Torquay).
Jonas, Saml. (Exon), 1783.
Keffutt, Walter (Exon).
Lord, John (Farringdon).
Lovelace, Jacob (Exeter), died 1766.
Mallett, Peter, 1705.
Mallett, John (Barnstaple), 1840.
March, R. (Honiton).
Otercey, John (Torrington).
Passmore, R. (Barnstaple).
Pile, Fra. (Honiton).
Pollard (Crediton), 1760.
Pollard, Thomas (Exeter).
Price (Wiveliscombe).
Rew, Joseph (Wiveliscombe).
Routledge, George (Lydford), died 1801.
(Epitaph Lydford Churchyard.)
Sanderson, Geo. (Exeter).
(Maker and patentee of tools for duplicating parts of watches,
1761.)
Scoble, John S. (Colyton).
Simons, A. (Bideford).
Skinner (Exon).
Snell, E. (Barnstaple).
Stocker (Honiton).
Strowbridge (Dawlish).
Stumbel (Totnes).
Thorn (South Molton).
Thorne, Sim (Tiverton), 1740.
Thorne, Michl. (South Molton).
Tickle, John (Crediton), 1730.
Upjohn, Richard (Exon).
(Long-case clock, _c._ 1730.)
Upjohn, Wm. (Exeter), 1741.
Upjohn, Peter (Bideford).
(Watch, 1780.)
Weller, Geo. (Exon).
Wood, I. (Exon).
Waldron, John (Tiverton).
Dates from church registers, family Bibles, old wills, marriage
records, and old newspapers to amplify local lists such as this
add greatly to their value in establishing period of clock.
[4] 1912-13, p. 242.
[5] 1914-15, pp. 204, 205; and July 1917.
Jacob Lovelace, of Exeter, who died in 1766, was the maker of a
remarkable clock of most elaborate nature, with organ that played,
and a series of moving figures striking the hours, and bellringers
and other intricate diversions. This clock was exhibited at the
International Exhibition in 1851, and is now at the Liverpool Museum.
A fine long-case clock in Chippendale style by Cockey, of Warminster,
is illustrated (p. 239), and exhibits provincial work both in case and
movement of the highest character.
[Illustration: BRASS DIAL OF CLOCK.
By Shenkyn Shon (Blackcock Inn, Pontnedd Fechan).
1714.
(_At National Museum of Wales, Cardiff._)]
[Illustration: IRON DIAL OF THIRTY-HOUR CLOCK.
Single hand and alarum. Mid-eighteenth century. Ornamented with designs
of various phases of Sussex iron industry.
Maker, Beeching (Ashburnham).
(_From the collection of J. C. Dawson, Esq., F.S.A._)]
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK WITH RARE OVAL DIAL.
Subsidiary seconds and calendar dials. Blue painted decoration, under
glass, in spandrels above dial. Fine carved work in oval frame.
Maker, Marston (Salop). Brass plate on door dated 1761.
(_By courtesy of Walter Idris, Esq._)]
Strowbridge, of Dawlish, is the maker of a bracket clock, in date about
1805, showing pleasing work in the fine marquetry decoration introduced
by Sheraton (illustrated p. 201). There is an instance on record of a
clock being sent to "Mr. Strowbridge" for repair. "When it came back
his name, 'H. Strowbridge, Dawlish,' was engraved upon the dial."
=Miscellaneous Makers--East Anglia.=--Several makers are connected with
Yarmouth. There is Thomas Utting (Yarmouth), and we have seen a fine
long-case clock signed thus, and there is Isaac Johnson (Yarmouth), who
apparently made wall clocks. John Page, of Ipswich, is the maker of a
very handsome bracket clock, in date about 1740 (illustrated p. 187).
The name of Henry Terold, Ipswich, is found on a round silver watch
with chased interlacing bands and silver dial, of seventeenth-century
period. Joseph Chamberlain, of Norwich, is a name found on a late
seventeenth-century watch. The names of Mann and Jon. Nevill, both of
Norwich, are found on late eighteenth-century grandfather clocks.
=Kent and Sussex.=--The name of William Gill or Gilt, of Maidstone,
is found on a fine long-case clock of the eighteenth century.
William Gardner, of Sandwich, and Joseph Carswell, of Hastings, are
other names found on grandfather clocks of the latter part of the
eighteenth century. The dial of a clock by a Sussex maker, Beeching,
of Ashburnham, from a thirty-hour clock with single hand and alarum
(illustrated p. 243), is of mid-eighteenth century period, and shows in
its decorations the various phases of the iron industry carried on at
Ashburnham.
=Welsh Clocks.=--At the Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru, at Cardiff, the
National Museum of the Principality, there is a long-case clock by B.
C. Vaughan, of Pontypool, and a brass block with movement by "Shenkyn
Shon, Black Cock Inn, Pontnedd Fechan, 1714," and also there exhibited
are the works of the old clock from St. David's Cathedral.
Illustrated on p. 245 is a unique long-case clock with brass plate on
door, with date 1761, with dragon above. The particular feature of
especial interest in this clock is its oval dial (which is separately
illustrated, p. 249). This dial is enamelled white, and has a medallion
at top representing the figure of Hope with an anchor. The other
decoration is interesting as exhibiting the attempt of the provincial
maker to simulate in pigment the marquetry work of the Sheraton school,
the design being similar to that found on tea-caddies, no doubt well
known to the painter of the dial. There are two subsidiary dials, one
for seconds and the other showing the days of the month.
[Illustration: DIAL OF CLOCK ILLUSTRATED P. 245.
This oval form is rare. The Sheraton type of decoration painted on dial
is a noticeable feature. The panel is reminiscent of Pergolesi. The
lower dial indicates the days of month.]
[Illustration: DIAL OF CLOCK ILLUSTRATED P. 233.
Lunette painted with figure subject of woman and pitcher at stream.
Spandrels decorated with roses in red and gold.]
Although the maker's name is "Marston (Salop)" there is an especially
Welsh interest attaching to this clock. It once was in the possession
of Daniel Owen, the famous Welsh novelist, who is buried in Mold
churchyard, and whose monument is in the County Hall Field at Mold. He
introduced this clock into his novel, _Rhys Lewis_. The grandmother of
the youthful hero of the story had gone to the fair; in her absence
the boy took this clock to pieces, so the story goes. But as the
hours wore on he found it was easier to take it to pieces than to
put it together again. The scene on the return of his grandmother is
piquantly described. The clock-work ran like a thing demented, and
the tell-tale hands revealed the secret of the culprit, who uneasily
fingered a missing wheel in his pocket, and he had forgotten to put on
the pendulum.
The hood of the clock is of original decoration. The upper spandrels
have a blue-and-gold floral design, covered with glass. The two lower
spandrels are delicately carved. The frame around the oval dial is of
beaded work cut in broad and effective style.
Altogether this clock possesses features appealing to collectors. The
provincial maker followed his own lines, and has in so doing produced
something unique.
* * * * *
In conclusion, some apology should be made for an attempt to sketch
in makers of repute, scattered over so wide an area, which resulted
in a mere outline. The meagre lists may in many cases be said to be
noteworthy for their omissions. But want of space has precluded the
writer from pursuing the subject further, and he may be permitted to
express a hope that the perusal of these facts may stimulate local
efforts to worthier records.
CHAPTER IX
SCOTTISH AND IRISH CLOCKS
David Ramsay, Clockmaker Extraordinary to James I--Some
early "knokmakers"--List of eighteenth-century Scottish
makers--Character of Scottish clocks--Irish clockmakers: Dublin,
Belfast, Cork--List of Irish clockmakers.
Among the most notable of the early Scottish makers was David Ramsay,
who was clockmaker to James VI of Scotland and followed that monarch to
London. In Sir Walter Scott's _Fortunes of Nigel_, Ramsay is introduced
as a character. "David Ramsay by name, who, whether recommended by his
great skill in his profession, as the courtiers alleged, or, as was
murmured among his neighbours, by his birthplace, in the good town of
Dalkeith, near Edinburgh, held in James's household the post of maker
of watches and horologes to his Majesty. He scorned not, however, to
keep open shop within Temple Bar, a few yards to the eastward of St.
Dunstan's Church."
It appears that he was of a mystical turn of mind, and conceived the
idea of treasure buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. Dean
Withnam gave permission to dig, and prudently stipulated as a condition
that he came in for a share. One John Scott, pretending to the skilled
use of the divining rod, Ramsay, and several others, according to the
astrologer Lilly in his _Life and Times_, dug 6 feet deep with the aid
of labourers and came to a coffin, but as it was not heavy they did
not open it, "which we afterwards much repented." When at this impious
task a terrific storm arose, and "we verily believed the west end of
the church would have fallen upon us." Candles and torches, except one,
were extinguished. "John Scott, my partner, was amazed, looked pale,
knew not what to think or do until I gave directions and command to
dismiss the demons; which when done, all was quiet again, and each man
returned unto his lodging late, about twelve o'clock at night." The
share of the Dean in the treasure therefore came to nought.
The _Dictionary of National Biography_ supplements and corrects
Sir Walter. "Clockmaker Extraordinary" was Ramsay's title, and his
son says: "When James I succeeded to the crown of England, he sent
into France for my father, who was there, and made him page of the
bedchamber and keeper of his Majesty's clocks and watches."
He was of considerable reputation, as, when the charter of
incorporation was granted by Charles I to the Clockmakers' Company of
London, he was appointed as the first master in 1631. He apparently
was not of a worldly disposition, and it is believed that when the
destinies of the Stuarts were under a cloud he was in great poverty.
His son writes of his father: "It's true your carelessness in laying
up while the sun shone for the tempests of a stormy day, hath given
occasion to some inferior spirited people not to value you for what you
are by nature and in yourself, for such look not to a man longer than
he is in prosperity, esteeming none but for their wealth, not wisdom,
power, nor virtue."
The knowledge of what manner of man was this old Scottish clockmaker
adds a pleasure to the contemplation of his work. At the Guelph
Exhibition were shown a clock and alarum watch with single hand,
dated 1636, signed _D. Ramsay_. This was on the eve of the Civil War,
a year before Hampden refused to pay ship money in England and the
introduction of a new Prayer Book in Scotland. But the Prayer Book was
no sooner opened at St. Giles's, Edinburgh, than a murmur ran through
the congregation, and the murmur soon grew into a formidable riot. The
Covenant signed in the churchyard of the Greyfriars at Edinburgh set
a flame alight throughout Scotland. "Such was the zeal of subscribers
that for a while many subscribed with tears on their cheeks"--some were
indeed reputed to have "drawn their own blood and used it in place of
ink to underwrite their names."
In such times old David Ramsay, away in the South, saw Stuart
magnificence come to a close. At the British Museum is a watch he signs
"_David Ramsay, Scotus me fecit_." In signing thus, he shows he was
proud of being a Scotsman, and as a great Scottish clockmaker his name
and record are given the place of honour at the front of this sketch of
Scottish work. His watches are richly decorated in the French style;
doubtless he learned his craft in France. His last years were passed in
the stormy period of the Revolution, and he lived to see Cromwell and
the Roundheads defeat Leslie at Dunbar. He died in Holborn in 1654, the
year of the union of England and Scotland under Cromwell by Ordinance.
=Some Early "Knokmakers."=--A clock in Scottish is a _knok_. It would
appear that the early "knokmakers" were more conversant with the Kirk
knok, the Tolbooth knok, and the College knok, than with the domestic
clock or watch.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, as in England at a slightly
previous date, clockmakers formed themselves into trade guilds. London
was incorporated in 1631. Edinburgh followed in 1646, Glasgow, 1649,
Haddington, 1753, and Aberdeen not till 1800. The metal-workers of
Scotland have always been renowned, and at the above dates clockmakers
were eligible to enter the Hammermen's Incorporations as affiliated
with the craft of locksmith, which was of ancient lineage.
During the seventeenth century the Scottish clockmakers, in common
with English, came under foreign inspiration. But the eighteenth
century saw a complete school of makers springing up in various parts
of the country, flowing to, and again flowing from, Edinburgh and
the Canongate (including Leith), which were the earliest centres of
Scottish clockmaking.
[Illustration: BRASS LANTERN CLOCK.
With brass dial and fine fretwork. Inscribed "Humphry Mills at
Edinburgh Fecit." Date, about 1670.
(_In the Glasgow Museum. Reproduced by permission of the Glasgow
Corporation._)]
We mention a few of the early makers. There was Humphry Mills, who
is referred to in the minutes of the Incorporation of Hammermen,
Edinburgh, in 1661. There is an example of his work in the Antiquarian
Museum, Edinburgh, and we illustrate another in the Corporation
Museum at Glasgow (p. 259). This lantern clock, with brass dial and
fine fretwork with floriated design, is inscribed _Humphry Mills at
Edinburgh fecit_.
Richard Mills, or Milne, was apparently the nephew of Humphry, and was
admitted a freeman clockmaker at Edinburgh in 1678. He died in 1710.
Another early maker is John Alexander, of Edinburgh, made a freeman
in 1671, his trial being to make "ane Knok and mounting and ane sun
dyall," also a "Kist lock and key," this part of the locksmith's craft
being one of the necessary proofs of craftsmanship for admission as a
fully qualified Hammerman. He died in 1707. It is interesting to note
that he had to construct a sundial. The art of dialling is intricate,
and this indicates that the old clockmaker had a sound technical and
scientific knowledge. He was evidently no maker of clocks as "bits o'
mechanism," or an assembler of parts. He understood principles.
Thomas Gordon, apprentice to Andrew Brown, Edinburgh, 1688, was in
business for forty years and died in 1743. His nephew, Patrick Gordon,
was the son of Alexander Gordon, of Briggs, and seems to have been a
man of wealth, apart from his trade as a clockmaker. A fine example of
his work is illustrated (p. 263), a long-case clock having the door
of lacquered work in the "Chinese taste." On the case without the
panel is stencilled work, attempting to follow out the style of the
imported panel. This example indicates what has already been advanced
in the chapter on Lacquered Cases (pp. 110, 114), that such work was of
foreign origin. This panelled door is of oak.
Other seventeenth-century makers include Paul Roumieu, 1677 to 1694,
the first practical watchmaker who came to Edinburgh. Before that date
only clocks were attempted.
Paul Roumieu, jun., son of the above, was admitted as a freeman of
Edinburgh in 1692, and died in 1710.
=List of Eighteenth-century Scottish Makers.=--In regard to the
activities of Scottish clockmakers in comparison with their
fellow-craftsmen across the border, it is interesting to note that
there are very few examples of the early crown and verge escapement by
Scotch makers, but there are a great number of the anchor escapement.
Although invented by Hooke in 1675, this was not taken up readily. This
unwillingness to adopt new styles is a feature in clockmaking in the
provinces and in Scotland. The works of a clock are not unfrequently
put by the maker into a case belonging to a period of cabinet work
of some forty years previous. The clockmaker was an autocrat, and
compelled the case-maker to follow old traditions in making cases.
[Illustration: LONG-CASE CLOCK.
With door decorated in lacquer; remainder of case finished in stencil.
Maker, Patrick Gordon, Edinburgh (1705-15).
(_By courtesy of Edward Campbell, Esq., Glasgow._)]
The following names of noted makers of the eighteenth century are
usually found on long-case clocks of the grandfather type:--
Richard Alcorn (Edinburgh), 1703-39 (died).
Thomas Ancrum (Edinburgh).
Apprenticed 1703 to Andrew Brown.
Andrew Brown (Edinburgh), 1665-1711 (died).
Apprenticed to Humphry Milne.
Alexander Brownlie (Edinburgh), 1710-39 (died).
Hugh Campbell (Edinburgh).
Apprenticed to Humphry Milne 1692.
James Cowan (Edinburgh), 1744-81 (died).
John Dalgleish (Edinburgh), 1742-70 (died).
Alexander Ferguson (Dundee), 1777.
Jos. Gibson (Ecclefechan), about 1750 (see illustration, p. 267).
Patrick Gordon (Edinburgh), 1699-1749 (died).
Thomas Gordon (Edinburgh), 1688-1743 (died).
James Greig (Perth), 1773-76.
Thomas Hogg (Edinburgh).
Apprenticed to Andrew Brown 1698.
{ Anthony Hopton (Edinburgh).
{ Matthew Hopton (Edinburgh).
{ Makers of wooden clocks 1799-1817.
{ John Hopton.
{ Carried on business to 1850.
John Kerr (Glasgow), 1783.
Andrew Lyon (Port Glasgow), 1783.
Geo. Munro (Canongate), 1750-99.
Thomas Reid (Edinburgh), 1762-1831 (died).
Author of _Treatise on Clock and Watchmaking_, 1826.
John Russell (Falkirk), 1797-1818 (died).
Geo. Skelton (Edinburgh), 1773-1834 (died).
John Smith (Pittenweem, Fife).
Self-taught. Came to Edinburgh in 1774. Maker of musical clocks,
etc. Disposed of his clocks by lottery in 1809 at Edinburgh.
Archibald Straiton (Edinburgh), 1739-84 (died).
Wm. Sutor (Edinburgh), 1712-15.
William Veitch (Haddington), 1758.
James Young (Edinburgh), 1756.
The writer desires to record his indebtedness to the useful _Handbook
and Directory of Old Scottish Clockmakers from 1540 to 1850_, by
John Smith, Esq., published by William J. Hay, Esq., John Knox's
House, Edinburgh, 1903. This volume is now out of print, and a new
and enlarged edition containing no less than 2,700 names is shortly
appearing. No student or collector of Scottish clocks can afford to be
without this volume, as it is the only one dealing with its subject.
In regard to districts in England and Wales, there is an opportunity
for local antiquarian societies to gather and tabulate county lists on
the lines of this Scottish volume. The records of provincial makers are
still exasperatingly incomplete.
There is the authoritative volume by the late F. J. Britten, _Old
Clocks and Watches and their Makers_, with a list of over 10,000 names.
But in the main these are of London makers.
=Character of Scottish Clocks.=--It is seldom that a clock by a
Scottish maker is found to be cased in old oak. Most of the long-case
clocks are of mahogany, which was not in general use till about 1740.
It is true that there are exceptions, some few being found in lacquered
or Dutch marquetry cases, but the majority are in mahogany.
In regard to clockmaking on a lower plane, there are the interesting
clocks, with the works entirely constructed of wood, usually beech, as
being the best wood adapted to cutting the teeth for the wheels; other
woods used were holly and boxwood. Very few old examples now remain.
There seems, too, to have been a strong proclivity towards the musical
clock. Several great makers produced fine examples of this class of
clock which played popular airs. No doubt in the days of musical boxes,
prior to the age of the gramophone, the great folk at Edinburgh, when
the "Wizard of the North" enchanted society, had a penchant for these
musical sweet-chiming clocks. Daniel Brown, of Mauchline, made the
modest clock that stood in the cottage of Robert Burns; and James Gray,
or John Smith, or Patrick Toshach, or one of the other clockmakers
who made the hours "fading in music," may have constructed some
musical marvel for the master of Abbotsford.
[Illustration:
DIAL OF LONG PENDULUM CLOCK.
With single weight for going and striking trains. Spandrel ornaments
finely cut and chased, representing the Four Seasons.
ENLARGEMENT OF DIAL.
Showing maker's name, "Jos. Gibson, Ecclefechan."
About 1750.
(_By courtesy of Edward Campbell, Esq., Glasgow._)]
[Illustration: WALL CLOCK.
Maker, George Graydon (Dublin). Date, about 1796.
With marquetry design showing volunteer in uniform, with G.R. on his
cartouche box.
(_At the National Museum, Dublin._)]
An interesting clock with the maker's name, Jos. Gibson, Ecclefechan,
is illustrated (p. 267). It has a long pendulum and single weight for
striking and going trains. The spandrels are finely cut and chased and
represent the four seasons. This is a feature found on Dutch dials.
In date this is about 1750. The enlargement of the dial (p. 267)
shows that the engraver went wrong in his spacing. He had to put the
last letter above the others. Indeed, it suggests that another hand
than that which engraved the decoration and the name of the maker
contributed the place. It is somewhat puzzling, and leads to conjecture
as to its history. It is just such examples, out of the main stream
of leading makers, which so often provide exceptional interest to the
collector.
=Irish Clockmakers.=--The art of the clockmaker in Ireland, although
having by no means lagged behind that of Scotland, has not received the
attention of collectors and connoisseurs which it deserves.
Researches are being made, and new data are coming to hand which will
assist the student to determine the period of Irish clockmakers'
work. There are some 1,100 names already known of makers, and those
interested await the results of close and painstaking investigation
which will enable the record to be published.
By the kindness of Mr. Dudley Westropp, of the National Museum, Dublin,
the following names are here given, tabulating a few of the leading
Irish makers of the eighteenth century:--
George Aicken (Cork), 1770-95.
A clock by this maker is illustrated (p. 273).
Michael Archdekin (Dublin), 1769-1800.
Joseph Blundell (Dublin), 1703-32 (died).
Thomas Blundell (Dublin), 1733-75 (died).
Timothy Conway (Cork), 1783-1804 (died).
Thomas Coote (Dublin), 1733-47.
Hugh Cunningham (Dublin), 1755-77 (died).
George Furnace (Dublin), 1751-73.
Charles Gillespy (Dublin), 1747-71 (died).
Alexander Gordon (Dublin), 1756-87 (died).
There was an Alexander Gordon at Dundee, 1729. Maker of the first
clock at Brechin Town Hall.
George Graydon (Dublin), 1764-1805 (died).
A clock by this maker is illustrated (p. 269).
Martin Kirkpatrick (Dublin), 1720-69 (died).
John Knox (Belfast), 1729-83.
Frederick May (Dublin), 1770-96.
Thomas Meeking (Dublin), 1682-1709 (died).
John Nelson (Dublin), 1786-1813.
James Pickering (Dublin), 1737-71 (died).
William Ross (Cork), 1764-1817.
Samuel Slocomb (Cork), 1735-50.
Edward Tounley (Dundalk), 1820-24.
Richard Wyatt (Dublin), 1731-55 (died).
These dates do not represent the makers' complete history. Some may
have worked prior to the first date and after the last date, except
when stated as having died then.
In regard to Belfast, the late Isaac W. Ward contributed some notes to
the _Belfast Evening Telegraph_ in 1909 on "Early Belfast Clock and
Watchmakers," which enable some interesting particulars to be given.
In 1791 one Job Rider announced that he had commenced business in
Belfast, "where he makes clocks and watches of all kinds in the common
manner with Harrison's and other modern improvements." It would
appear that he had been to London, where possibly he was apprenticed,
and had visited Dublin and Hillsborough. From 1805 to 1807 he was
in partnership with R. L. Gardner. After 1807 he seems to have been
associated with William Boyd.
[Illustration: MUSICAL CLOCK BY GEORGE AICKEN (CORK).
Date, 1770-95.
Lunette marked "Minuet, March, Jigg, Air, Minuet, Gavot." The indicator
is pointing to "Air." Two subsidiary dials marked "Strike," "Not
Strike," and "Chime," "Not Chime."
(_At National Museum, Dublin._)]
[Illustration: REGULATOR CLOCK. MAHOGANY CASE.
Made to hang from two rings at back of clock. Maker, Sharp (Dublin).
Early nineteenth century, showing French influence.
Height, 3 ft. 5-1/2 in. Width, 10-3/4 in. Base, 11-3/4 in.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. Harris & Sinclair, Dublin._)]
Robert Neill, who was apprenticed to Job Rider in 1791, set up business
in Belfast in 1803 and joined R. L. Gardner from 1809 to 1818. At
this date the firm became known as Robert Neill & Sons. Robert Neill
died in 1857. His descendants still carry on business at Belfast.
Another Belfast maker was James Wilson, who worked in the middle of
the eighteenth century. There is a record of a musical clock being
advertised by him in 1755, which he had constructed to play a number of
tunes.
The wall clock by George Graydon, of Dublin (illustrated p. 269), shows
some interesting features. The circle round the dial is carved wood
gilt; the dial itself is painted and very much cracked. The lower part
is harewood inlaid. In date this example is about 1796, as it will be
seen the volunteer in uniform on panel has G.R. on his cartouche-box.
The bracket clock by George Aicken, of Cork (illustrated p. 273), is
of fine proportions and sound design. It has striking and chiming
movements, and plays six tunes marked on lunette, "Minuet, March, Jigg,
Air, Minuet, Gavot."
An early nineteenth century clock by Sharp, of Dublin, is illustrated
(p. 275). It is a miniature long-case clock, being only 3 feet 5-1/2
inches high. It is made to hang on the wall, as there are two rings at
the back of the case for this purpose. Its glass door, showing the
pendulum, indicates the French influence, which in the early nineteenth
century made itself felt in Ireland as elsewhere.
In 1783 a company of Swiss watchmakers came to Ireland, and
establishing themselves near Waterford, termed their settlement New
Geneva. By 23 & 24 George III, 1784, they were granted power to assay
gold and silver. An earlier Act of George II provided for only one
standard of gold--22 carats. This new Act admitted three--22, 20, and
18 carats. These facilities were granted to encourage the manufacture
of watches and watch-cases in Ireland. This Assay Office at New Geneva
did not continue in operation more than six years.
The office at New Geneva had equal powers with the Dublin Assay Office.
"The Assayer or Wardens are hereby required to make, on a plate of
pewter or copper, impressions of such marks or punches, with the names
and places of abode of the owner thereof, in a book or books to be
carefully kept for that purpose, if such owners be resident at Dublin
or New Geneva." Watches or other articles of gold and silver having the
stamp "New Geneva" are in date 1784 to 1790.
CHAPTER X
A FEW NOTES ON WATCHES
The age of Elizabeth--Early Stuart watches--Cromwellian
period--Watches of the Restoration--The William and Mary
watch--Eighteenth-century watches--Pinchbeck and the toy
period--Battersea enamel and shagreen.
Early makers of English watches do not crowd the stage. On the
Continent pocket clocks had had a long life before they made their
appearance in this country. Queen Elizabeth had only one pair of
silk stockings--she had been used to "cloth hose"--before her
lady-in-waiting presented her with a pair straight from the Continent.
Italian and French ideas were fast acclimatizing themselves here.
Shakespeare laid many of his plays in Italy; the modern Elizabethan
Englishman became quite Italian; the Queen read Tasso and Ariosto
in the originals. In Germany the watch had taken various forms. The
watchmakers of Nuremberg were renowned throughout Europe. "Nuremberg
eggs," as they were styled, set the fashion for watches of all shapes
suited to the conceits of the owner. Some were in the form of a skull,
with appropriate mottoes concerning Time and Death; others were in the
form of a cross, of a book, or shaped like a tulip or other flowers,
or simulating butterflies and insects. The earliest styles had closed
cases, these cases being subjected to various forms of ornament. The
dial was not visible till the outer case was opened.
Collectors of watches are collecting something that is dead. The
wheels are silent for ever. The interest lies in the remoteness of
the conception of a pocket clock. Possibly there is no one alive who
could now set the wheels into motion, as there are no designers who
could originate the exquisite tracery and filigree work, the perfect
enamelling and the delicacy of metal work these old watches exhibit.
They belong to a world apart. Clocks of old masters still carry on
their functions: the hand still revolves in unison with the slow swing
of the "royal pendulum." As timekeepers they equal most of the modern,
and excel the cheap clock, hardly worth designating as a timekeeper.
But the Swiss and the American factory-made watch, claiming no
equality of artistic embellishment, have dethroned the antique watch
in regard to accuracy. Curious and rare examples of the latter crowd
the shelves of museums as being representative of that mysterious past
when Time was of less moment than it is now. They belong to the age
of the missal and the illuminated manuscript, and of the advent of
printing with Caxton's well-balanced page. They are at variance with
modernity. They were machines before the age of machinery--their very
mechanism protests against being regarded as scientifically accurate.
One lingers over their ornament with loving regard and forgets their
purport. As timekeepers they fell short of the abbey clock, or of the
sundial--a perennial stickler for truth when the sun shone. When the
long pendulum, under the auspices of Christopher Huygens, commenced
swinging, a timekeeper ready to hand eclipsed their gold and enamelled
triumphs. But as fashionable baubles they had their continuous
evolution, from Thomas Chamberlaine de Chelmisforde to Pinchbeck, and
from Tompion to Eardley Norton. A considerable amount of ingenuity was
given to producing examples of diminutive size which should perform
adequately the correct functions of a timekeeper. But accuracy and
scientific exactitude came late in the story of evolution. At length
man's ingenuity triumphed. There are watches no larger than filberts
which keep exact time, but there are thousands which do not.
[Illustration: OLD ENGLISH WATCHES. SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.
I. Elizabethan Watch, with carved and repoussé open-work design.
II. James I Watch. Dated 1620. Maker, Yate (London).
III. Cromwellian Plum-shaped Silver Watch, with crest engraved on case.
IV. Charles II Watch. 1660. Made by Snow of Lavington (near Bath).
V. William III Watch. Maker, Thomas Tompion. About 1690.
(_By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq._)]
The last popular watch, which our grandfathers termed a "turnip," was
the stage prior to modern development, and at that stage collecting
ends.
A scientific classification of watches would resolve itself under the
following heads:--
I. _Early watches_, prior to the invention and general adoption of the
fusee, that is, from about 1500 to 1540. This period would be further
subdivided into (_a_) those with movements entirely of steel; (_b_)
the next stage, with plates and pinions of brass and the wheels and
pinions of steel; and the latest stage, (_c_), in which the plates and
wheels were brass and the pinions of steel, as at the present day.
II. _Watches from about 1540 to 1640_, all having fusees, and being
made of every conceivable shape and size: octagonal, oval, cruciform,
in the shape of a book, and so on. The cases were sometimes of crystal
or bloodstone, and enamelled designs and chased gold work were
predominant features.
III. _Watches of the seventeenth century_, from 1610 to 1675, at
which date the pendulum spring was invented. These are mainly round
in shape, according to the fashion about 1620, which superseded
the ancient quaint forms. The cases, both of silver and gold, were
richly enamelled, and moving calendars and astronomical details were
frequently made.
IV. _Late seventeenth and early eighteenth century watches._ These
would embrace the period from 1675 to 1720, after the invention of the
pendulum spring.
V. _The eighteenth century watch._ This should include all the
improvements, changes in decorative style, and other details bringing
the watch up to the threshold of the nineteenth century and modernity.
We can only indicate the type of watch as falling under the various
periods, and specimens of the leading types are illustrated (pp. 283,
287).
The watches are numbered in the illustrations from one to ten, and can
thus be easily identified by the reader.
[Illustration: OLD ENGLISH WATCHES. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
VI. Watch with black piqué case. Maker, Peter Garon (about 1705).
VII. Early Georgian Watch with dark enamel dial. Maker, Duhamel. 1740.
VIII. Watch with repoussé work on case signed V. Haut. Maker, Haydon.
1731.
IX. Watch. Maker, Daniels of Leighton. About 1760.
X. Late Georgian Watch with dial and decorations in Battersea enamel
and shagreen case.
(_By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq._)]
_No. 1_ shows the character of an Elizabethan watch. The fine case
shows the quality of the chased and repoussé open-work design.
_No. 2_ is a James I oval watch, and the maker is Yate, of London.
This watch is dated 1620, in the reign of James I, the year when the
_Mayflower_ sailed to America and New England was founded by those wise
Puritans who foresaw the oncoming civil war of the next reign. The
Earl of Ashburnham exhibited at the Stuart Exhibition in 1889 a gold
watch which formerly belonged to Charles I, inscribed "Henricus Jones,
Londini." Another maker of watches of this period is Edward East. The
silver alarum clock given by Charles I on his way to execution to
Thomas Herbert was made by Edward East. "Through the garden the King
passed into the park, where making a stand, he asked Mr. Herbert the
hour of the day: and taking the clock into his hand, gave it him, and
bade him keep it in memory of him." This silver alarum watch is still
treasured in the Mitford family.
_No. 3_ is a Cromwellian silver watch, plum-shaped. As coats of arms
were not so sinful as painted cherubs and stained-glass windows,
this bauble with elaborately engraved crest survived the wreckers'
despoiling hand. Cromwell himself boasted of a crest, and in some
respects it resembled that used by royalty.
_No. 4_ is a Restoration watch made by Snow, of Lavington, near Bath.
It exhibits fine ornamentation and is a beautiful specimen of Late
Stuart style when sumptuousness, under the guiding influence of the
French Louis Quatorze grandeur, made itself felt in this country.
_No. 5_ is worthy of respect and admiration as being the work of that
great maker, Thomas Tompion. It is of the William and Mary period. The
craftsman had arrived at the period of a scientific endeavour to create
a perfect timekeeper. The case indicates utility; ornament is in due
subjection. The Arabic figures showing the seconds on the dial should
be observed.
_No. 6_, of which the back is shown, is a watch by Peter Garon. It is
in black piqué case, finely decorated in a subdued and reticent manner.
Peter Garon flourished between 1694 and 1706. But in that year, when
Marlborough's campaigns were at their full height, poor Garon felt the
stress of commercial depression and became bankrupt.
_No. 7_, showing the front and open case, is a fine watch by Duhamel,
about 1740, bringing us to the days of George I and Walpole.
_No. 8_, with its fine broad repoussé case, is by Haydon, and the case
is signed "V. Haut."
_No. 9_ shows an illustration of the back, where the movement is
visible. The maker of this is Daniels, of Leighton, 1760.
_No. 10_ is by Kemp, London, and is decorated in Battersea enamel and
shagreen. This brings us to the age of Pinchbeck, "the toyman in the
Strand," and suggests the gewgaws and trifles, the enamelled heads for
malacca canes, the snuff-boxes, and all the fashionable paraphernalia
of a man about town. The watch in some respects had begun to lose
its old character and was again a toy.
[Illustration: CALENDAR WATCH. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
Maker, "Thomas Chamberlaine de Chelmisforde" (signature shown on
right-hand illustration).
The outer circle shows days of month. The indicator is pointing to 22nd.
(_By courtesy of Messrs. Mallett & Son, Bath._)]
Among interesting work is that of Thomas Chamberlaine de Chelmisforde.
He worked in the brightest days of Charles I, when the arts were
receiving stimulation from the Court. A new era seemed as though it
might be about to dawn. The picture gallery of Charles I at Hampton
Court showed his catholic taste, and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, was
a patron of the arts. Vandyck and other great artists flocked to this
country, and highly trained craftsmen commenced to build a reputation
which later iconoclasts swept aside as of Baal.
In the watch illustrated by Thomas Chamberlaine there is something
delightfully simple and chaste. He was a maker whose work promised
much. There is a specimen of his work signed "Chamberlain Chelmisford"
at the British Museum, but in the specimen illustrated the name is
chased "Thomas Chamberlaine de Chelmisforde."
The study of watches of the various periods is a fascinating one. When
the collector leaves the path of clocks, with their more Gargantuan
proportions, to become a student of the intricacies of the art of the
watchmaker as exemplified in some of his greatest triumphs, he has
been enticed on a quest which is unending. No field in collecting and
connoisseurship has claimed more devotees.
INDEX
"Act of Parliament" clocks, so-called, 124
Adam style, its employment in the clock-case, 147
Robert, clock-case by, illustrated, 139
Aicken, George (Cork), clock by, 277
Alarum clocks, 54
and striking clocks, early, 32
Ale-house clocks, Oliver Goldsmith quoted, 127
American clocks--
"Banjo clocks," 124
Bracket clock, by Savin and Dyer (Boston), 198
Lantern clock, with pendulum, 59
Anchor pendulum, the, 59
Arnold, John (Bodmin), 37, 212
Astronomical clock-dial, the, 28
Babylonian measurement of time, 28, 29, 30
Bacon, quoted, 53
Balance and weights prior to pendulum, 33
Barraud, clock by (1805), 203
Battersea enamel employed for watch-cases, 290
Beginners, hints for, 41
Belfast clocks and clockmakers, 272
Bewick, Thomas, engraver of clock-dials (1763-74), 215, 217
Biddell, clock by, 204
"Birdcage" clocks, 54
Böttger, his porcelain at Meissen, 109
Boulle, André Charles, and his marquetry, 72, 73, 111
Bracket clock, the, 179-204
or wall clock, the, early use of, 46, 49
Brass lantern clock, the, 45-63
Bristol clock illustrated, 149
Britten, F. J., _Old Clocks and Clockmakers_, full lists of
makers in, 37
Brownhill, Henry (Leeds), copper token of, 218
Cabrier, name falsely put on Dutch clocks, 36
Calendar watch illustrated, 291
Case, the, evolution of, 155
Catherine of Braganza, dowry of, 107
Centres of clock and watch making in 1797, 214
Chamber clocks an established feature in furniture, 192
Chamberlaine, Thomas, de Chelmisforde, watch by, 291
Charles I, watch belonging to, 289
Charles II, death-bed scene of, 50, 53
Watch by Robert Hooke presented to, 36
Cherub head, the, a favourite ornament, 166
Its use on clock-dial, 169
Its use on Stuart furniture, 170
Cheshire clock-case, peculiarities of, 230
Chester, Bishop of (John Wilkins), quoted, 30
Chinese style of Chippendale, 91, 108
Designs at Worcester, Bow, and Bristol porcelain factories, 108
Taste, the _furore_ in France and Holland, 108
Chintzes, the early character of, 111
Chippendale, his Chinese style, 91, 108
His indebtedness to Marot, 155
Style in clock cases, 136
Clockmakers' Company, 1704, transactions of, quoted, 36
On fabrications of English work, 36
Clockmakers, the great English, 35
English, full list of, 37
Clockmaking, decadence of, 38
Personality in, 38, 39
Collecting period, the, 38
Collectors, hints for, foibles of, 39, 41
Colour _versus_ form, 110
Cookworthy, William, his true porcelain at Plymouth, 109
Copper tokens of clockmakers illustrated, 218, 236
Cork, clocks and clockmakers at, 289
Cornwall clockmakers, list of, 241
Country marquetry, 60
Cromwellian "plum" watch illustrated, 283
Cumming, Alexander, clock by (1770), 203
Day and night, 27, 29
Day, the, its division into hours, 28
Lunar, 29
Mean solar, 28
Delft, Dutch, ornamentation of, used in marquetry, 98
Devon and Cornwall clockmakers, list of, 241
Dial, the--
Brass, with silvered hour circle and engraved figures, 158
Character of, 157
Correct proportions of the, 165
Early form of, 30
Evolution of, 162, 165
Iron painted ornament and figures, 158
Position of maker's name on, 158, 161
Dickens, _Dombey and Son_ quoted, 31
Domestic clock, the, 33
Draper, John (1703), dial of clock by, 158
Dublin clocks and clockmakers, 272
National Museum, examples at, illustrated, 269, 273
Dutch clock panels imported, 97
Delft ware, its imitation of porcelain, 111
Fabrications of noted English makers, 36
Influence on cabinet-maker, 67
Influence on clockmaker, 217, 271
Origin of long-case clock, 154
Ornament found on clocks--
Cupids and crown, 170
Marquetry panels, 92
Phases of moon, 217
Spandrel with Seasons, 271
Dutton, Matthew, 37
Thomas, 37
William, 37
Earnshaw, Thomas (1750), 37, 212
East Anglian clockmakers, list of, 247
East, Edward, 37
East India Company, the Dutch, 107
The English, 109
Ebsworth, John, 37
Edict of Nantes and its effect, 68, 90, 120
Edinburgh clocks and clockmakers, 261-265
Eighteenth century, best period of clockmaking in, 40
Elizabethan watch illustrated, 289
Ellicott, John (Bodmin), 212
English masters of clockmaking, the great, 35
School of lacquered work, 114
Equation of time, 29
Evelyn, _Diary_ of, quoted (1681), 107
Evolution of the English mantel clock, 186
Evolution of long-case clock, 153
Base, its changing form, 155
Dial, its character, 157
Hands, their differing types, 174
Spandrel, its ornamentation, 166
Waist, its varying proportion, 155
Exeter clockmakers, list of, 241
Fleur-de-lis ornament on dial, 174
Foreign craftsmen working in England--
Dutch marquetry workers, 83, 92
French Huguenot cabinet-makers, 69, 90
Italian glassworkers, 69
Form, changing, of hood, waist, and base, 155
Innovations of, in clock-cases, 141
_versus_ colour, 111
French clocks and their influence, 147, 197, 278
Influence on mantel clocks, 197
Fromanteel, Ahasuerus, pendulum introduced into England by, 37
The family of, great clockmakers, 37
Furniture, influence of, on clock case, 141
Georgian clocks (1720-1830), 131
German school of marquetry, 72
Gibbons, Grinling, 121
Glasgow, example at Corporation Art Gallery illustrated, 259
Glass windows, when first used in coaches, 161
Workers in London, seventeenth-century, 69
Goldsmith, Oliver, _Deserted Village_ quoted, 127
Gordon, Patrick (Edinburgh), clock by, 261
Thomas (Edinburgh), 1668-1743, 261
Graham, George (1673-1751), 212
His evidence as to Robert Hooke's invention, 36
Grandfather clock, the, its Dutch origin, 74
Its long survival, 135
Its popularity, 135
Grant, John, 37
Inn clock by, illustrated, 125
Graydon, George (Dublin), clock by (1796), 277
Greek measurement of time, 28, 29
Halifax and district, list of clockmakers, 217
"Halifax" grandfather clocks, 217
Hampton Court, Dutch character of, 91
Protestant style of decoration at, 170
The work of Daniel Marot at, 91
The work of Sir Christopher Wren at, 91
Hands, the, evolution of, 174
Hour hand, at first employed, 30, 157
Minute hand first added, 30, 158
Harris, Richard, clock by, at St. Paul's, Covent Garden, 35
Harrison, John, 37
His chronometer, 212
Hill, Thomas, clock by (1760), 197
Hogarth, William, the possibility of engraved clock-dials by, 161
Home Counties, the, list of clockmakers, 236
Hood, changing forms of the, 155
Hooke, Dr. Robert, his claim for invention of balance-spring for
watches, 36
His inventions, 212
Watch by, presented to Charles II, 36
Hour, the, its division into minutes, 30, 158
Hours, division of day into, 30
Huguenot refugees settle in England, 68, 120
Huygens, Christopher, Dutch astronomer, his work, 33
His quarrel with Dr. Hooke, 36
Huygens, Dutch cabinet-maker, his imitations of Japanese lacquered
panels, 111
Inlaid furniture, 70, 71
Inn clock, the, 124
Innovations of form in clock-cases, 141
Irish clockmakers, list of, 271, 272
Italian school of marquetry, 71
James I appoints Ramsay as "Clockmaker Extraordinary," 256
Japanese lacquer, specimens of, 106
Johnson, Thomas, clock by (1730), 191
Jones, Henry, Charles I watch made by, 289
Charles II clock by, 212
Kent and Sussex, clockmakers of, 247
Kew Gardens Botanical Museum, Japanese lacquer at, 106
Knibb, Joseph, father and son, 37
Joseph (1670), 211
Clocks by (1690), 191, 236, 241
Copper token of (1677), 236
Knokmakers, the, of Scotland, 258
Labarte, _Arts of the Middle Ages_ quoted, 33
Lac and its properties, 105
Its introduction into England, 107
Lacquer--
Chinese and Japanese origin of, 105, 106
Dutch imitations, 110, 111
English school of lacquer work, 118, 121
French masters, 112
Its use in the clock-case, 105
Work--
English school of, 114
Foreign craftsmen in London, 120
School of English amateurs, 121
Lacquered clock-case, its peculiarities, 112
Panels imported from the East, 109
Lamb, Charles, quoted on sundials, 162
Name falsely put on Dutch clocks, 36
Lancashire clock-case, peculiarities of, 230
Clockmakers, list of, 230
Lantern clock--
Early form, 45
Its similarity to ship's lantern, 46
Lilly, _Life and Times_ quoted, 256
Liverpool and district, list of clockmakers, 224
Long-case clock--
Dutch origin of, 154
Evolution of the, 153
Georgian period, the, 131
Lacquer period, the, 105
Stability of the, 132
Veneer and marquetry period, the, 67
Loomes, Thomas, clock by, 191
Lovelace, Jacob (Exeter), 212, 242
Lowestoft china, so-called, with Dutch inscription, 173
Lunar day, the, 29
Lunette, the use of the, in dial and case, 158
Lustre ware clock vase, Staffordshire, 198
Macaulay, his account of death of Charles II, 50, 53
Mahogany long cases, the period of, 136
Makers, old, their personality given to clocks, 38
Mantel clocks, the English character of, 185
Marot, Daniel, his work at Hampton Court, 90, 91
Designs of long-case clocks, 155
Marquetry--
Country cabinet-makers' use of, 84
Decadence of, 100
Definition of, 71
Dutch school of, 79
Early English attempt at, 84
Finest period, 40, 79, 83
Foreign influence on English art, 79
German school of, 72
Imported sheets, frequent use of, 84, 97
Italian school of, 71
Provincial, 60
Revival of, Sheraton period, 123, 147
Veneer, the use of, with, 74
Martin, Sieur Simon Etienne, his varnish, 112
Mary, Queen, and Hampton Court, 98, 170
Massy, Henry (1680), dial of clock by, 158
Mean time, 29
Mechanism of clocks, early, 32
Midlands, list of clockmakers in the, 230
Mills, Humphry, Edinburgh (1661), 261
Richard, Edinburgh (1678-1710), 261
Minute, the, its division into seconds, 30
Mudge, Thomas, Exeter (1715), 37, 212
Musical clock attributed to Rimbault, 142
by George Aicken, Cork, 277
Name of maker, position on dial, 161
Names found on dials, origin of, 213
Nantes, Edict of, and its effect, 68, 120
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, list of makers, 215
New Geneva (near Waterford), Irish watchmaking centre at, 278
Silver assayed at, 278
New York Metropolitan Art Museum, clocks illustrated, 57, 193
Nineteenth century, best period of clockmaking in, 40
Long-case clock of the, 147
North of England, list of clockmakers, 215
Nottingham clockmakers, list of, 235
Numerals on dial, note on, 158, 165
Painted furniture simulating lacquer work, 123
Panels, lacquered, imported from the East, 109
Marquetry, their use in clock-case, 97
"Parliament" clocks, so-called, 124
Pendulum, the--
Advent of, 50
Early studies relating to, 154
First introduction of, 33
Introduced into England by Fromanteel, 37
Length of, determined by longitude, 179
Types of--
the anchor, 59;
the "royal" or long, 33;
the short, its position at front of dial, 33
Pepys' _Diary_ quoted (1667), 161
Personal clock, the, 34
Personality in clockmaking, 38
Pinchbeck, Christopher, 37
Period of watches, 290
Pitt, his tax on clocks (1797), 124
Pope, _Essay on Criticism_ quoted, 31
Porcelain, true, its introduction into Europe, 109
Poy, Godfrey, clock by (1745), 192
Pre-pendulum clocks, 33
Provincial clocks and makers, 211
Makers, some great, 211
Quare, name falsely put on Dutch clocks, 36
Queen Mary, her influence in rebuilding Hampton Court, 98
Ramsay, David, 255;
watch signed by, 257
_Réfugié, le style_, its introduction into England, 90
Regulator clock, the, 148
Repairs, ignorant restoration to be avoided, 42
Riesener, the marquetry of, 111
Rimbault, Stephen, 37
Noteworthy for musical clocks, 142, 147
Roentgen, David, the marquetry of, 111
Science, the dawn of, 35
Scott, Sir Walter, _Fortunes of Nigel_ quoted, 255
Scottish clocks, 255
Character of, 266
Makers, eighteenth century, list of, 261, 262
Second, the, the second division of the hour, 30
Hand, the, 30
Seventeenth century, dawn of science in the, 35
Types of lantern clock, 53
Watches, 286, 287
Shagreen cases to watches, 290
Shakespeare, _As you like it_ quoted, 162
_King John_ quoted, 32
Sheraton style in clock-cases, 147
Spandrel ornament on clock-dial--
Artistic difficulty of, 166
Cherub head style, 166, 169
Cupids and crown style, 170
Spanish proverb quoted, 185
Specialization of clockmaking, 37
Spring, the, its early use as a motive power, 32
Staffordshire earthenware clock vase, 198
Stalker and Parker, treatise on "japanning" (1688), 122
Striking and alarum clocks, early, 32
Strowbridge (Dawlish), clock by, 204
Clock repaired by, 247
Stuart and Tudor ages compared, 35
Sundial, the, and its tradition, 162
Time, 29
Sussex, clockmakers of, 247
Clock (Ashburnham) illustrated, 243
Swiss watchmakers settled in Ireland (1784-90), 278
Table clocks, great variety of, 185
Time, apparent and mean, equation of, 29
and its measurement, 27
Babylonian method of reckoning, 28, 29, 30
Tokens, copper, of clockmakers illustrated, 218, 236
Tombstones, ornament on, indicative of contemporary styles, 157
Tomlinson, William, 37
Tompion, Thomas (1671-1713), 212, 236
Name of, falsely put on Dutch clocks, 36
Tudor and Stuart ages compared, 35
Veneer and marquetry, the use of, 74
Definition of, 69
Modern delicacy of, 69
Verge escapement of old clocks, 33
Vulliamy, Benjamin, 37
Benjamin Lewis, 37
Justin, 37
Wales, clocks made in, 248
Wall clock, early use of, 46, 49
Inn clock illustrated, 125
Irish wall clock illustrated, 277
Wall-paper--
Early use of in England, 99
Period in marquetry, 99
Repeat design of, on marquetry, 100
Walnut period of long case, 135, 136
Watches, Old English--
Battersea enamel, 290
Cromwellian, 289
Early Stuart, 289
Eighteenth-century, 290
Elizabethan, 289
Pinchbeck period, 290
Typical English described, 285, 286
William and Mary, 290
Watches, Liverpool and district famous for, 224
Waterford, Swiss watchmakers at, 278
Watson, Sam (Coventry), clock by (1687), 186
Webster's _New International Dictionary_ quoted, 30
Wedgwood medallions as ornaments to clock-case, 204
Welsh clocks and makers, 248
West Country clockmakers, list of, 241
Wilkins, John, Bishop of Chester, quoted, 30
William and Mary period of decoration, 92, 97, 98
Windmills, name falsely put on Dutch clocks, 36
Woodcarvers at Hampton Court, 170
Wooden works of clocks, 266
Wren, Sir Christopher, his work at, Hampton Court, 91
Yorkshire clock-case, peculiarities of, 223, 229
Clockmakers, 217
Zoffany, clock-cases decorated by, 142
_Printed in Great Britain by_ UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM
PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON
CHATS ON ENGLISH EARTHENWARE
(Companion volume to "Chats on English China.")
BY ARTHUR HAYDEN
With coloured Frontispiece and 80 Full-page Illustrations of specimens
of Earthenware, Lists of Prices, Glossary, Bibliography, and
Reproductions of 200 Marks.
_Cloth_, 6s. net.
"Complementary to the useful companion volume, in this 'Chats'
Series, on English China which Mr. Hayden issued five years
ago."--_Times._
"Is a compendious account of our native English faïence,
abundantly illustrated and accurately written."--_Guardian._
"A thoroughly trustworthy working handbook."--_Truth._
"It is a mine of knowledge, gathered from all quarters, and the
outcome of personal experience and research, and it is written
with no little charm of style."--_Lady's Pictorial._
"Mr. Hayden knows and writes exactly what is needed to help the
amateur to become an intelligent collector, while his painstaking
care in verifying facts renders his work a stable book of
reference."--_Connoisseur._
"The volume has been written as a companion to Mr. Hayden's 'Chats
on English China' in the same series, and those who recall the
admirable character of that book will find this to be in no way
inferior."--_Nation._
"The illustrations are profuse and excellent, and the author
and the publishers must be commended for offering us so many
reproductions of typical specimens that have not appeared in any
previous handbook. The illustrations alone are worth the cost of
the book."--_Manchester Guardian._
"Mr. Hayden's book is filled to overflowing with beautiful and
most instructive and helpful illustrations, and altogether it
is one that will give immense pleasure to collectors, and much
information to the admiring but ignorant."--_Liverpool Courier._
LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD., 1, ADELPHI TERRACE.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Other |
| errors are noted below. |
| |
| Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant |
| form was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. |
| |
| Ambiguous hyphens were retained. |
| |
| Mid-paragraph illustrations have been moved between paragraphs and |
| some illustrations have been moved closer to the text that |
| references them. The List of Illustrations paginations and those |
| in image captions were not corrected. |
| |
| Italicized words are surrounded by underline characters, |
| _like this_, bolded words by equal signs,=like this=. |
| |
| Corrections: |
| Bartholomew Newsom -----> Bartholomew Newsam (p. 46) |
| Kenneth Maclellan -----> Kenneth Maclennan (p. 114) |
| panels of ergolesi -----> panels of pergolesi (p. 121) |
| Ralph Beilly -----> Ralph Beilby (p. 216) |
| Peter Garron -----> Peter Garon (p. 287). |
| |
| Note: |
| Page 173: Quinton, Yarmouth. The letter u in these two words |
| appears with a dot on top. These words are shown as follows: |
| Q[.u]inton, Yarmo[.u]th. |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Chats on Old Clocks" ***
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