Pair-case watch

During the first quarter of the nineteenth century Swiss watchmakers began using gemstones with holes drilled in them to pivot the arbors of the wheels in their clock movements that were subject to the greatest wear.[1] A pocket watch in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection is engraved on the inside cover for the movement with the signature: “A Vacheron Girod”; the serial number of the watch; the type of movement; and, significantly, the number of rubies in the movement (26.267.18).[2] The name A. Vacheron Girod was used by the Geneva firm of Vacheron Constantin beginning in 1786 [3] until about 1832, the year of the manufacture of this watch, indicated by the serial number.



More than a century earlier, Swiss mathematician and polymath Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1664–1753), or Facio de Duiller, as he is often called in horological literature, had visited England where he eventually settled. Fatio traveled extensively, and his colleagues included Jean- Dominique Cassini in France, Christiaan Huygens in the Netherlands, and Isaac Newton in England, for whom he translated Continental scientific publications and with whom he pursued alchemical experiments. By 1687, Fatio was in Oxford, and on May 2, 1688, he was granted membership in the Royal Society.[4] In 1693, he introduced a watch with a spiral-spring balance made by the watchmakers Peter and Jacob Debaufre. The Debaufres are believed to have been born in France, but by 1689 Peter had been admitted as a Brother in the Clockmakers’ Company in London.[5] In association with the Debaufre brothers, in May 1704 Fatio petitioned the British Parliament for a patent to drill gemstones for use as bearings (i.e., endstones) in watches and clocks. At the time, this improvement consisted of embedding a half-drilled gemstone in the brass cock of a watch or clock movement, thus providing a durable hole for pivoting the end of an oscillating balance staff of a verge escapement. The advantage of using precious stones over brass or precious metal for this purpose was the hardness of the gems.



News of the patent (number 371) alarmed members of the Clockmakers’ Company, and a December 11, 1704, entry in the company’s Court Minute Books records the decision of the company to petition Parliament to stop any extension of the patent.[6] This petition was vigorously pursued, apparently somewhat disingenuously, and the story of the difficulties created by the company for Fatio has been told in the early editions of F. J. Britten’s Old Clocks and Watches and Their Makers (1911).[7] Reports of the Clockmakers’ opposition to the patent, their assertion that the invention was not new, and the account of their production as evidence against the grant of an “Old Watch” with “[t]he Maker’s Name Ignatius Huggeford—That had a stone fixed in the Balance” appear in a January 15, 1704, entry of the Court Minute Books. There is more to the story, but it is interesting to note that a James Delander (active 1668–ca. 1706), a London goldsmith who became a Free Brother in the Clockmakers’ Company in 1669 and who was an uncle of Daniel Delander (1678–1733), was paid three guineas for this “information in opposing the Jewell Watch Bill in Parliament.”[8]



It is, thus, probably not greatly surprising that a pair-case watch by Daniel Delander in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection should be found to have a half-drilled diamond endstone. The watch can be dated with certainty before 1720, but many English watchmakers continued to use jeweled endstones throughout the eighteenth century, or about a hundred years before they were in general use by Swiss watchmakers.



The movement of the Museum’s Delander watch consists of two circular plates held apart by four openwork, V-shaped pillars fashioned into a distinctive design that has been attributed to Delander. It contains a three-wheel train that is driven by a mainspring and fusee and regulated by a verge escapement with a balance spring. The most prominent feature of the watch is a large pierced and engraved balance cock screwed to the back plate. A pink diamond endstone with a tiny hole drilled halfway through is embedded in a silver frame held in place on the balance cock’s table by three screws, the diamond pivots the balance staff of the watch. Engraved in script above the balance cock is the signature, “D. Delander,” together with the serial number, 623, and the place of origin, London. Below, there is a silver figure plate for the adjustment of the balance spring. The winding square for the mainspring projects through the lower left of the back plate and can be accessed through a hole in the back of the inner case.



The champlevé silver dial has a chapter ring with concentric calibrations indicated for the hours (I–XII), half hours (diamond-shaped marks), and minutes (5–60, by fives, with single minutes marked by lines). The so-called beetle and poker hands are finely sculpted of blued steel. Their arbor divides a cartouche in the center of the dial that is signed, “DELANDER / LONDON.”



The outer case and inner cases are made of plain silver, and both are stamped on their interiors with the serial number 623 and the initials “WI,” partly effaced, but without question the maker’s mark of William Jaques (active 1679, died 1720). Jaques was a specialist watchcasemaker who served part of his apprenticeship under Nathaniel Delander (1648–ca. 1691), the maker of the cases for three of the Thomas Tompion watches in the Museum’s collection.[9] Jaques has been studied in some detail by historian J. A. Neale, who states that he began his apprenticeship with John Wright Sr. on December 1, 1679, before being turned over to Delander for the remainder of his training, that he became free of the Clockmakers’ Company on September 29, 1687, and that his burial in London’s Saint Sepulchre Holborn Church was recorded on January 24, 1719 (actually 1720 in the new calendar). An inventory made at the time of Jaques’s death, and which was discovered by Jeremy L. Evans and quoted extensively by Neale, provides a great deal of information about the successful and prosperous London craftsman in the early eighteenth century.[10] While describing one of Jaques’s more elaborately ornamented cases for a watch by Joseph Windmills (active 1671–ca. 1720) now in the British Museum, London, Neale noted that “many of Jaques’s silver and some of his gold cases are plain. There is not much more to be said of these than that they are generally robust, well hinged, split bezelled—much as might be expected.”[11] His description aptly fits the Metropolitan Museum’s watchcase.



There is a small but deep dent in the bezel of the cover of the outer case near the pendant. There are signs of ordinary wear, especially on the outside of the inner case. The movement is in excellent condition. The watch entered the Museum’s collection in 1917 as part of the gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, who acquired it from the British banker Frederick George Hilton Price.[12]



Notes (For key to shortened references see bibliography in Vincent and Leopold, European Clocks and Watches in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015)



[1] Jaquet and Chapuis 1970, p. 74; Cardinal 1989, p. 64.

[2] Acc. no. 26.267.18.

[3] See entry 51 in this volume, and Patrizzi 1998, pp. 386–89. See also Gibertini 1964, p. 244; Treasures of Vacheron Constantin 2011, p. 34.

[4] Mandelbrote 2004.

[5] Loomes 1981, p. 188.

[6] Clockmakers’ Company, London, Court Minute Books, Ms. 2710/3, 1699–1729, p. 55v, Guildhall Library, London.

[7] See, for example, Britten 1911, pp. 587–88.

[8] Clockmakers’ Company, Court Minute Books, Ms. 2710/3, p. 56r.

[9] Acc. no. 17.190.1487a, b; see also entries 17.190.1512 and 17.190.1489a, b in this volume. The authors are indebted to Jeremy L. Evans, formerly of the British Museum, London, for providing the birth date of Nathaniel Delander.

[10] See Neale 1992.

[11] Ibid., p. 346.

[12] Williamson 1912, pp. 162–63, no. 173.