Watch

One of the ways in which watchmakers who had not been apprenticed to a Parisian master, and, therefore were not eligible to open an establishment in Paris, could circumvent the rules of the Guild of Master Clockmakers (Corporation des maitres horlogers, established 1544) was by setting up a workshop outside the jurisdiction of the guild. The privileged close of the Abbey of Saint Germain-des-Prés on the left bank of the river Seine was one of the enclaves where the guild’s rules did not apply, and in the eighteenth century, it would become the site of the workshops of such distinguished clockmakers as the Swiss Henri Enderlin (died 1753) and the German Michel Stollenwerck (died 1768).[1] From the signature on the back plate of the Metropolitan Museum’s watch it can be certain that Meybom was one of the watchmakers working there in the seventeenth century. Aside from this exquisite watch, there is another watch with a similar square movement, signed “F. L. Meybom,” and housed in a closely comparable case in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England.[2] Nothing more is known about Meybom.



The movement of the Metropolitan’s watch consists of two square, gilded-brass plates that are held apart by four baluster pillars, which are pinned to the back plate. The watch is spring driven with a chain fusee and four wheels that end in a crown-wheel and verge escapement with a steel balance wheel. On the back plate, the worm-and-wheel setup for regulating the mainspring has blued-steel ornaments and a silver figure plate; below is the watchmaker’s signature “F. Meybom AParis / St. Germain.” The mounting for the set-up regulation, the case bolt, and all of the screws are of blued steel.



The diminutive size of the watch created problems for the watchmaker. The small movement required a reduction in the size of the wheels and their pinions, which could not be achieved without decreasing the number of teeth on the wheels, therefore causing a reduction of the gearing ratios involved. To solve the problem, an extra wheel was often added to the train. The small movement also required a small balance at the end of the train, and a small balance tends to tick faster. In other words, a small movement needs a larger gear ratio in the train to accommodate the smaller balance, while the smaller size actually causes a reduction in the gear ratio. Finally, the movement requires a smaller-than-usual fusee with fewer turns of the fusee chain. The duration of the watch (the maximum period between windings) will thus be lessened, resulting in a watch that needs winding twice a day.



The exterior of the square gold case is covered with four side panels of delicately chased openwork of gold floral and foliate designs applied over blued-steel grounds. The same technique was used to create the openwork design of flowers and foliage radiating from a central blossom on the back of the case that, like the side panels, plays bright gold ornament against a dark blue ground. Hinged to the case is a square bezel with eight rose-cut diamonds set in silver and framing a beveled-edge plaque of rock crystal, the center polished as a lens through which the chapter ring on the dial can be viewed. The dial, pinned to the top plate of the movement, is made of white enamel with pink and blue floral designs painted in the spandrels and a dark blue basse-taille enameled center. The roman numerals (I–XII) of the chapter ring are painted in black enamel with half-hour divisions marked by radiating lines and quarter-hour divisions by lines painted on the inner edge of the chapter ring. The single hand is made of sculptured gold.



The design of the Museum’s watchcase has been attributed by art historian Michèle Bimbenet-Privat to a Protestant goldsmith named Isaac Bergeron, who is first recorded to be living in Paris when his child was baptized in 1649.[3] Like the clockmakers, Parisian goldsmiths were required to be Catholic as one of the prerequisites to becoming a master in the guild. Bergeron would, therefore, have been forbidden to sign or to mark his work and could not lawfully sell it in Paris. But guild rules could be set aside if the king or his council wished. A record dated 1671 concerning the seizure by guild officials of a watchcase made by Bergeron for the watchmaker Guillaume de Beauvais (master 1630) demonstrates the advantage of royal influence: the watchmaker involved in the case was known to have the “care of watches and clocks of his Majesty’s Council,” and the seizure is recorded as having been overruled.[4] Bimbenet-Privat further proposed a square watch (now in the Musée du Louvre) with a movement signed by Balthazar Martinot (1636–1714), one of the king’s clockmakers, as an example of Bergeron’s watchcase making.[5] The Metropolitan Museum’s Meybom watchcase closely matches the case of the Louvre’s watch, and both belong to a small group of watches with similar cases that include another with a movement by Martinot that is also in the Louvre,[6] and still another by Auguste Bretonneau (active 1638–55) now in the Kremlin Armory, Moscow.[7]



The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 removed the right of toleration for French Protestants. Evidence of the French king’s special favor was found by Bimbenet-Privat in a record of 1686 in which “Isaac d’Argent,” probably the same goldsmith as Isaac Bergeron, was now granted special dispensation by the king’s council to continue making watchcases in Paris as he had been doing for the past eight years and without harassment from the guild.[8] D’Argent, his wife, Mary, and three children were last recorded in 1694 as émigrés in England,[9] so life as Protestants in Paris must have been difficult during these years.



While the evidence for the attribution of the case to Bergeron is not wholly convincing, and records of Meybom are evidently nonexistent, more is known about the other two watchmakers who signed watches in this group. Bretonneau can be found in Paris records working between 1638 and 1658.[10] He was the maker of movements for watches with painted enamel cases, one of which, in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, can be dated for stylistic and technical reasons to about 1645 or 1650.[11] It is not known how much later than 1658 he might have been active or even when he died, but he signed a silver traveling watch, also in the Museum’s collection,[12] that displays more advanced watchmaking technology than does the enamel-cased watch.



In regards to the Balthazar Martinot case we are on firmer ground, because he belonged to a large and distinguished family of clockmakers. Born in Rouen in 1636, the son of the keeper of the Gros Horloge (the town clock of Rouen), Martinot had a career in Paris that included appointments as clockmaker to the queen mother, Anne of Austria (1601–1666), and later to King Louis XIV (1638–1715). While there was more than one Balthazar Martinot who made clocks, the one born in Rouen in 1636 is believed to be the only one authorized between 1660 and 1715 to sign his work “Balthazar Martinot à Paris,” as the Louvre’s watches are signed.[13]



The Martinot watches have been dated to the third quarter of the seventeenth century, but given Martinot’s age, his watches are not likely to have been made before about 1660. In any case, they must have been made before about 1675 or 1676, for the Louvre’s Martinot watches and the Metropolitan’s Meybom watch all have pre–balance spring movements. In addition, the watches display a remarkably high degree of skill, finish, and attention to detail. It seems reasonable to suppose that they would have also incorporated the latest technical improvement: namely the spiral spring balance. Invented in late 1674 by Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695), the balance spring enormously increased the accuracy of a watch. Almost immediately Isaac II Thuret (1630–1706), another of the illustrious horologists of the reign of King Louis XIV, was given Huygens’s instructions for making a model of the device, and by 1676, after a dispute over the possibility of obtaining a patent, Huygens granted free use of the invention to all watchmakers, [14] thus making the unregulated balance obsolete.



The blue enamel in the center of the dial of the Museum’s watch displays areas of deterioration.[15] Otherwise, there are signs of light wear in the movement and on the case of the watch, but both are in a remarkably good state of preservation. It is not known where the donor, J. Pierpont Morgan, acquired the watch.



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] For further information about the clockmakers of the Abbey Saint Germain-des-Pres enclose, see Augarde 1996, p. 46.

[2] Baillie 1929, p. 116, no. 5, and pl. xxv.

[3] Bimbenet-Privat 2002, vol. 1, p. 244.

[4] “Ayant le soin des monstres et horloges des conseils de Sa Majeste; ibid.

[5] Inv. no. OA 7030. See Cardinal 2000, p. 84, no. 53; Bimbenet-Privat 2002, vol. 2, pp. 490–91, no. 183.

[6] For the second watch in the Musee du Louvre (inv. no. OA 8294), see Cardinal 1984b, p. 42, no. 17.

[7] Treasures of the Kremlin 1997, p. 46, no. 9.

[8] Bimbenet-Privat 2002, vol. 1, pp. 244–45.

[9] See ibid., p. 245.

[10 ]Vincent 2002, pp. 101, 105, n. 32.

[11] Acc. no. 17.190.1626. See ibid., p. 96 and fig. 19, and p. 100, fig. 30.

[12] Acc. no. 17.190.1628. See ibid., p. 101 and figs. 33, 34.

[13] Augarde 1996, p. 368. See also Tardy 1971–72, vol. 2, pp. 442–44.

[14] See Cardinal 1989, p. 79. See also 17.190.1417 in this volume.

[15] For a discussion of a reason for the tendency of translucent blue enamel to deteriorate, see Wypyski 2000, pp. 150–51.