Watch

In Geneva during the seventeenth century, watchmakers were permitted to make their own watchcases and to employ specialists who did not belong to the guild of goldsmiths. While in 1625 goldsmiths and lapidaries were expressly allowed to cooperate in the making of watchcases, it was not until 1698 that the making of watchcases became a separate trade with its own set of regulations. Fortythree masters were listed in the guild.[1] Their cases were often of sufficiently high quality to be mistaken for products from Paris or Blois. One such example is this watch in the Museum’s collection with a movement by Charles Bobinet (1610–1678), housed in a case and cover of agate that is mounted in enameled gold. The identity of the casemaker is unknown, but the watchmaker has been repeatedly identified as French not only by the author of the catalogue of watches belonging to J. Pierpont Morgan [2] but also by the compiler of what has become the standard dictionary of French clock- and watchmakers.[3] As recently as 2004 the author of the catalogue for the notable Edouard Gelis Collection in the Musée Paul Dupuy, Toulouse, has repeated a theory that Bobinet was a Frenchman from the Poitou region who worked in Paris from about the middle of the seventeenth century.[4] The author was apparently unaware of the 1949 publication by Eugène Jaquet that cited Bobinet’s birth and death records from the Geneva Archives de l’Etat.[5]



Bobinet was noted for supplying movements for cases that were made from various kinds of hardstone. The Museum’s watchcase is hollowed out from a single piece of partly translucent rose-colored agate. The cover, made from similarly colored agate, exploits the decorative effects in the mineral, which features lighter and darker rose-colored bands. A floral design in mustard-colored enamel in relief with dark-red highlights and a dark-blue ground ornaments the gold mount on the case. The design repeats in dark-blue and dark-red painted enamel on the gold bezel of the cover and at the base of the pendant. The pendant is plain gold and has a loop to which a gold chain is attached. The relatively large and easily read white-enamel dial is marked by roman numerals (I–XII) painted in black to designate the hours; three graduated dots for the half hours; and short lines in the inner edge of the hour chapter for the quarter hours. A small circle surrounds the end of the arbor for the single, sculptured, gold hand, and the motif of the bezel repeats for the cover.



The movement, like the cover, is hinged to the case at the twelve o’clock position. It consists of two circular, gilded-brass plates held apart by four turned pillars and contains three wheels ending in a verge escapement with a steel balance. The fusee is fitted with gut, and there are sculptured and blued-steel springs for the fusee stopwork and for the case bolt. The back plate carries an ornamental openwork balance cock that is screwed to the plate below a worm-and-wheel set-up regulator for the mainspring. The assembly of the set-up regulator is made of blued steel with extra scrolled flourishes attached to the mounting. The signature “Charles/Bobinet” is engraved within an ornamental cartouche situated below the balance cock.



The case and cover of this watch could, in fact, be mistaken for the work of a French goldsmith and lapidary. The Museum has a carnelian and enameled gold standing cup and cover produced in mid-seventeenth- century France and known to have belonged to King Louis XIV (1638–1715) (1982.60.134a, b).[6] While the cup and cover are the product of craftsmen with admittedly greater skills, a comparison with the Bobinet watchcase and cover does not make the attribution of the latter to French craftsmen implausible.



While it has been shown that the watchmaker Bobinet was born in Geneva, other watchmakers who were born in France provided movements for similar agate cases. One watchcase with a movement by Barthélemy Soret (1633–1717), who settled in Geneva in 1654, appeared on the auction market in 1996.[7] Another watch with similar enameled gold mounts, a comparable dial, a case of similar shape but made of serpentine, and a movement signed by Estienne Ester, a master in Geneva in 1652, is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.[8] The existence of these two watches, with movements by masters who are known to have been working in Geneva, lends further support for the attribution of the Museum’s watchcase to Geneva, in spite of the fact that both Soret and Ester are believed to have been born in France. Another watch with a similar agate case mounted in enameled gold and a movement signed “Gedeon de Combes” exists in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland,[9] but Osvaldo Patrizzi’s Dictionnaire des horlogers genevois lists de Combes (or Decombes) as a master clockmaker in Geneva during the second half of the seventeenth century.[10] Given the existence of these watches, all with movements presumably made in Geneva, it seems safe to suggest that the anonymous maker of their cases (known to be rarities) may have been a French émigré.



The Metropolitan Museum’s watch is for the most part in excellent condition with the exception that much of the original enamel on the bezel of the cover has been lost, and the repairs are deteriorating. There are also imperfections in the agate of both the case and the cover. The left mount for the worm-and-wheel set-up regulator of the mainspring is bent. J. Pierpont Morgan purchased the watch from the Frankfurt am Main and Berlin collector and dealer Carl H. Marfels sometime after 1904.[11]



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] Patrizzi 1998, pp. 45–49. See also 17.190.1014 in this volume.

[2] Williamson 1912, p. 36.

[3] Tardy 1971–72, vol. 1, p. 61.

[4] Hayard 2004, pp. 120–21.

[5] See Jaquet 1949 for the place and dates that are accepted in Gibertini 1964, p. 220, and Patrizzi 1998, pp. 107–8.

[6] Acc. no. 1982.60.134a, b. See Clare Vincent in Metropolitan Museum of Art 1984, p. 178, no. 94.

[7] Antiquorum 1996, p. 498, no. 637, ill. p. 499.

[8] Inv. no. WA1974.186. See Thompson 2007, pp. 36–37, no. 16.

[9] Inv. no. I-487. See Cardinal and Piguet 2002, pp. 118–19, no. 114.

[10] Patrizzi 1998, p. 152. No trace of de Combes can be found in Tardy 1971–72 or Augarde 1996.

[11] Speckhart 1904, pl. x, no. 3