Watch with portrait of Friedrick Wilhelm, the Great Elector

In seventeenth-century Europe some of the most talented enamel painters of portrait miniatures worked in Geneva. Among the best known was Jean I Petitot (1607–1691), the son of a Protestant émigré from Villiers le Duc in Burgundy and whose early training in Geneva under his uncle Jean Royaume (died 1654), a goldsmith, lasted until 1626.[1] Paul Prieur (1620–1684), a grandson of the French sculptor Barthélémy Prieur (died 1611), was apprenticed to Geneva goldsmith Jean Planchant in 1635.[2] It is not known where Petitot and Prieur learned the technique of enamel painting, but it is thought that they both may have trained in France.



Petitot traveled to Paris in 1632 about the same time the Toutins are known to have moved from Châteaudun, France, and were producing enamels using their recently developed technique of painting in colored enamels on a pure white enamel ground.[3] Records show that Petitot then traveled to England and painted the exquisite miniature of Queen Henrietta Maria (1604–1669) of England that is now in the Dutch Royal Collection.[4] Later he returned to France, and, although a Protestant, he was appointed court painter in enamel to King Louis XIV (1638–1715).[5]



Prieur traveled to Denmark in 1655 or 1656,[6] where he became painter of miniatures to the court of King Frederick III (1609–1670), whose portraits by Prieur are among the treasures of Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen.[7] Like Petitot, Prieur also spent some time in Paris, and it is believed that he knew the Toutins; later, he traveled to Prussia, Russia, and England.[8]



The Huaud family were descendants of Huguenots who settled in Geneva to escape increasing religious persecution in France.[9] Pierre I Huaud (1612–1680) was born in Châtellerault, France, and emigrated in 1630, becoming a master goldsmith in Geneva that same year. It is not known where he learned the technique of enamel painting, but it is possible that he learned his craft in Geneva by the late 1630s. In 1643, he married Françoise Mussard, the daughter of a Geneva lapidary, and they had three sons: Pierre II (1647–between 1696 and 1698), Jean-Pierre (1655–1723), and Ami (1657–1724), all of whom became well-known enamelers of miniatures, medallions, portrait cases, and the occasional cup and saucer, but a large majority of their enamels were watchcases. Like Petitot and Prieur, the Huauds were presented with the problem that the small Calvinist theocracy of Geneva did not contain a sufficient number of patrons to support the makers of luxury items such as their own. The Huauds, therefore, removed to Berlin. Pierre II is thought to have joined them in 1685.[10] By 1686, however, he was back in Geneva and succeeded in obtaining appointments for his brothers as painterenamelists to Friedrich III (1657–1713),[11] who would become Duke of Prussia and Elector of Brandenburg upon the death of his father, Friedrich Wilhelm, in 1688, and then king of Prussia in 1701. Pierre II returned to Germany in 1689 and was appointed painter-miniaturist to Friedrick III; he died in Berlin between 1696 and 1698.[12] His enamels are often difficult to distinguish from those of Jean-Pierre and Ami, but all three artists customarily signed their work and adopted systematic forms of signatures: Pierre II, using “Huaut l’aisne” (Huaut the Elder); Jean-Pierre, using “Huaut le puisne” (Huaut the Younger) when working alone, as on a watchcase with a portrait of a man in military dress in the Museum’s collection. When working with Ami, however, he and Ami signed “Les deux freres Huaut” (Two Huaut brothers) or “Les deux freres Les jeunes” (Two young brothers), sometimes adding the place as well. The latter signature appears on a second watchcase in the Museum’s collection (17.190.1436s, b).[13] The two younger brothers formed their partnership as early as 1682 in Geneva, and they left the service of the electors in Germany and returned to Geneva in 1700, where Jean-Pierre died in 1723 and Ami followed in 1724. The second watchcase appears to belong to the period after 1700, and to judge from the number of their surviving watchcases that contain movements by foreign watchmakers, they must have exported a large quantity of empty cases.



The signature, “Huaut le puisne pintre de son A. E. aberlin” (Huaut the Younger, painter to his Highness Elector of Berlin), appears in the cartouche on the band of the Huaud watchcase with the portrait. The painter was, thus, Jean-Pierre Huaud, and the portrait is of Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia (1620–1688), known as the Great Elector (Der Grosse Kurfurst).[14]



Ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor, Germany was a loose collection of territories and cities during the seventeenth century. By tradition, the emperor was elected by three prelates and four secular rulers who individually held the title Elector, which referred to their duty to choose the emperor. (From the end of the fifteenth century, however, the emperor was invariably a member of the Habsburg family.) Friedrich Wilhelm inherited land and the title Elector of Brandenburg from his father Georg Wilhelm (1595–1640), along with a number of separate territories throughout Germany that spanned from the Rhine to the Baltic Sea. While all territories were adversely affected by the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), Brandenburg, in particular, was devastated by famine, plague, and pillage. It has been estimated that Brandenburg’s population was reduced by half and that some parts of the territory had a loss of 90 percent.[15] At the time of his death in 1688 Friedrich Wilhelm had achieved a great deal to speed recovery of his domain and to elevate the position of both Brandenburg and Prussia within the Holy Roman Empire. He had created a standing army that was capable of defending its territory from attacks, and he had begun to turn Berlin into the permanent residence for the Electoral Court: hence the title of Great Elector. Among his efforts to repopulate the ruined city of Berlin, he welcomed Huguenot refugees who were fleeing King Louis XIV, of whom quite a few had skills in watchmaking.[16] It was in this context that the three Huaud brothers from Geneva were invited to Berlin to make some of their exquisite, painted-enamel watchcases, and it was by special permission of the council of Geneva that they were permitted to work for the electors.[17]



The portrait on the Museum’s watchcase records a stout man of late middle age who looks out at the viewer somewhat warily. He wears a full-bottomed wig and military armor with a splendid lace cravat. This image was adapted from a half-length portrait by Gedeon Romandon (1667– 1697), which is now in the Schloss Caputh, near Potsdam, Germany, the former country estate that belonged to Friedrich Wilhelm’s second wife, Dorothea, daughter of Philip, Duke of Holstein-Glücksburg. As Romandon is thought to have arrived in Berlin only a year or two before the Great Elector died,[18] the painting probably reflects the effects of the ill health that preceded his death in 1688.



The miniature is tightly framed by a double border of painted wheat-ear decoration that separates the back of the case from its side. The side is one continuous band of enamel that has been divided into four zones of decoration, each with an oval that frames a tiny landscape. An even smaller cartouche at the six o’clock position encloses the signature of the enameler. The inside of the case is enameled with another landscape, this one with a human figure in front of a partly ruined castle that is typical of the Huauds’ elegiac scenes, a number of which have been identified by Hans Boeckh as having been adapted from prints by the French artist Gabrielle Pérelle (1604–1677).[19]



A gold bezel hinged to the case holds a glass cover for the dial of the watch, now of white enamel with painted black roman numerals (I–XII) for the hours and Arabic numerals (5–60, by fives) for the minutes, and with a fine, openwork hour hand. (The minute hand must have been equally fine, but it has been awkwardly repaired.) The dial plate and movement, too, are hinged and open out of the case. The mainspring is wound from the front by a winding square that is accessed through the dial below the three o’clock position. The present movement, with a verge escapement, consists of two circular plates held apart by four cylindrical pillars and contains a train of three wheels. The back plate carries a large balance bridge with an openwork foliage design screwed to the plate and has a steel coqueret (or end plate) that secures the balance staff’s pivot, and an equally large silver figure plate (labeled “Avant / Retard”) for regulating the balance spring. The figure plate is flanked by the name of the watchmaker (“Racine”), the serial number of the watch (“110”), and his place of work (“Berlin”). Very little is known of the maker, but records show he came from Basel, Switzerland, and is believed to have been working in Berlin about fifty years after the Huauds returned to Geneva. Evidently, he made a new movement for a treasured watchcase.[20]



A second portrait watchcase, this one signed by Jean- Pierre and Ami, depicts Friedrich Wilhelm’s daughter-in-law Sophie Charlotte of Brunswick-Hanover (1665–1705), who in 1684 married Friedrich III. The watch, now in the Theodore Beyer Collection in Zurich, has a movement signed “Huet a Berlin,” and it is probably closer in date to the watchcase than would be the Metropolitan’s Racine movement.[21]



A more typical variety of Huaud watchcase is represented in the Museum’s collection by two examples,[22] each depicting the same scene from the well-known story in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe of Roman Charity as recounted in Book 9 of De factis dictisque memorabilis by the Roman historian Valerius Maximus (ca. 20 b.c.– ca. a.d. 50). As an allegorical representation of filial piety, it was the subject of many paintings, including several by the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). The origin of the Huaud version shown here (17.190.1436a, b) is unknown, however, and the female figure of Pero, who breastfed her incarcerated father, Cimon, in order to save him from starvation, may in fact record a living model. The watchcase, with its vivid blues and reds, was one of the Huauds’ more popular designs, probably as much for its liberal exposure of feminine flesh as for the moral of the story. This one contains a beautifully made movement with a verge escapement by Pieter Klock (1665–1754), one of Amsterdam’s finest clock- and watchmakers.[23]



J. Pierpont Morgan acquired the watch depicting the Great Elector from Carl H. Marfels of Frankfurt am Main and Berlin,[24] and the one depicting Roman Charity with his purchase of the Frederick George Hilton Price Collection.[25]



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] See Clouzot 1928, p. 203, for a transcription from the Minutes of Etienne Demonthouz, notaire, vol. 40, fol. 204, Archives d’Etat de Geneve.

[2] Fuhring and Bimbenet-Privat 2002, p. 133; Hein 2009, vol. 2, pp. 86–87.

[3] Schaffers-Bodenhausen and Tiethoff-Spliethoff 1993, p. 20. See also entry 12 in this volume.

[4] Ibid., p. 199, no. 180.

[5] Ibid., p. 21.

[6] Schneeberger 1958, pp. 136–37.

[]7 Hein 2009, vol. 3, pp. 94, 95, no. 673, and vol. 2, pp. 86–87, nos. 150–65, dated 1663, 1666, 1668, and 1669.

[8] One of his enamels is signed “Prieur a Londres” and dated 1682. See Schneeberger 1958, p. 137.

[9] For a more extensive biography of the Huaud family, see Cardinal 1989, pp. 169–76. See also Tardy 1971–72, vol. 1, pp. 301–8; Patrizzi 1998, pp. 228–30.

[10] Clouzot 1928, p. 104; Cardinal 1989, p. 169.

[11] Clouzot 1928, pp. 212–13.

[12] Cardinal 1989, p. 170.

[13] Acc. no. 17.190.1436a, b.

[14 ]For a good biography of Friedrich Wilhelm in English, see McKay 2001.

[15] Ibid., pp. 49 and 96, n. 1. See also Konig 1988, p. 23, for figures on the population of Berlin.

[16] McKay 2001, pp. 179–82.

[17] See transcriptions from the Minutes of Gabriel Grosjean, vol. 22, fol. 525, entry of Sept. 18, 1682, and P.H. 3793, entry of June 7, 1686, Archives d’Etat de Geneve. Clouzot 1928, pp. 212–15, doc. nos. lv, lvi.

[18] Foerster 1934, p. 544.

[19] Boeckh 1982, pls. 14, 15, 17–20, 22, 23, 26–29, 31, 36, 38, 39.

[20] Konig 1988, p. 74.

[21] Uhrenmuseum Beyer Zurich 1996, pp. 74–75, no. 31.

[22] Acc. no. 17.190.1436a, b and 17.190.1414a, b.

[23] Eugene Jaquet and Alfred Chapuis noted that the Huauds were collaborating with Amsterdam watchmakers even before 1700. See Jaquet and Chapuis 1970, p. 122.

[24] Williamson 1912, pp. 104–6, no. 98, and pl. xlviii.

[25] Ibid., pp. 197–98, no. 219.