Table clock

Some of the earliest mechanical clocks in Europe were produced by English clockmakers. Church records document the existence of horologia in the late thirteenth century, which may or may not refer to mechanical clocks, but by 1322, it is known that Norwich Cathedral Priory had a new astronomical clock with accompanying automata that consisted of fifty-nine figures and a procession of (mechanical) monks.[1] In his Tractatus Horologii Astronomici (A Treatise on the Astronomical Clock) (1327–36), Richard of Wallingford (ca. 1292– 1336) described an ambitious clock with a mechanically driven astrolabe, containing a moving sun, moon, and planets, made for the Abbey of Saint Albans, and which was reconstructed in the twentieth century using Wallingford’s treatise.[2] The turret clock in Salisbury Cathedral (probably ca. 1386, although extensively rebuilt) and the clock from Wells Cathedral (1392–93) in the Science Museum, London, both large, iron-framed, weight-driven striking clocks, are fourteenth-century survivals, now believed to be the work of Flemish clockmakers.[3]



The introduction of the spring to fifteenth-century horological technology and the attendant changes to clockmaking do not seem to have interested English clockmakers, and as late as the turn of the seventeenth century, most small, spring-driven clocks and watches were made by émigrés. Many of the clockmakers were refugees from the Low Countries,[4] including Andrewe Noway (or Nawe) and Michael Nouen (or Noewen), the latter represented by a watch in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection,[5] John Vallin and Nicholas Vallin, the latter the maker of an extraordinary enameled gold watch in the form of the ensign of the English Order of the Garter (see 17.190.1475 in this volume).[6]



The earliest-known native-born English maker of small domestic clocks was Bartholomew Newsam (Nusam or Newsham). It is not certain where or when he was born, but John Newsam, probably a brother, who was also a clockmaker, lived in York. At the time of his death, Bartholomew owned lands and dwellings in the same area.[7] Records show that Bartholomew married Parnell Younge at the church of Saint Mary-le- Strand in London in September 1565.[8] Records from April of the same year show that he obtained from the Crown a thirty-year lease on premises in the Strand,[9]which is presumably where he was living with his wife and four of their children when he made his will.[10] To judge from his bequests, he died a wealthy man.



As clockkeeper to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) for at least part of the time during his residence in London, he was paid 32 shillings and 8 pence by the Queen’s Privy Seal in 1583 for “mending of clockes’ during the previous year.”[11] A document from 1572 provides evidence that Newsam was to be granted the post of Clockmaker to Queen Elizabeth when it should become vacant.[12] The then-current office holder was the long-lived Nicholas Urseau (died 1590), and if we accept Adrian Finch’s discovery of the date of Newsam’s death as January 17, 1587, and burial on February 9 in Saint Mary-le-Strand, Urseau outlived Newsam.[13]



The cylindrical case of the Metropolitan Museum’s table clock is made from engraved, chased and gilded brass with a profile molding that supports a gilded, pierced, and chased strapwork dome. On opposite sides of the case, there are hinged doors that open for viewing the position of the gut on the fusees of both the going and the striking train of the clock. A small silver dial with a chapter of hours marked I–XII and a single, sculptured, iron hand (neither original to the clock) are attached to the top of the dome and framed by another profile molding. The bottom of the case is friction fitted and framed by a third profile molding. The molding is pierced by two holes to permit winding and marked “S” and “M” (for “striking” and “movement”). It is signed on the exterior side, “BARTHOLMEW NVSAM,” within a stylish strapwork-ornamented frame that hangs from a ribbon with tasseled ends. The side of the cylinder is ornamented with two roundels that depict, respectively, a helmeted warrior in profile and a longhaired female figure wearing a topknot. Both figures are encircled by wreaths of laurel leaves and flanked by plump foliate scrolls, which incorporate berries, flowers, and half-human, half-goat grotesques.



The spring-driven movement, with fusees cut to accommodate gut, consists of two circular-brass plates held apart by four turned-brass pillars pinned to the top plate, which extend through the bottom plate and end in ball feet. It has a going train made up of three wheels with a verge escapement regulated by a balance, and a striking train of four wheels that ends in a fly. The present count wheel permits the striking of the hours, one through twelve, by activating a hammer mounted inside the bell. It has a fusee of eighteen turns and a duration of not quite twenty-four hours. The going train has a going fusee of sixteen and one-half turns and a duration of slightly more than twenty-four hours.



At some point in its past the steel parts of the movement apparently rusted, and perhaps as early as the eighteenth century, a serious attempt to remedy the damage was undertaken. The arbors have been replaced, and they now have pinions of six leaves, but the clock is geared for pinions of five leaves. With the exception of the escape wheel, the contrate wheel in the going train, and the fly in the striking train, the remaining wheels, all of them brass, are apparently original to the clock. The steel verge, the balance, and also probably the balance cock have been replaced. The mainspring in the going train is old and slightly too big for its barrel, which indicates that it, too, is a replacement. The bell has been broken and repaired. The silver dial, now calibrated for twelve hours, replaces one that probably indicated the days of the week as well as the hours, and there is a new hour-wheel assembly. At one point the movement was attached to the case by two screws instead of the steel latches secured by S-shaped springs that are now employed to create a very French-like construction. Plugged holes in the side of the case indicate the former position of the screws.



The overall form of the case is also comparable to a series of French clocks believed to have been made during the last quarter of the sixteenth century.[14] Various details of the construction of the movement of the Museum’s clock also suggest that Newsam may have been trained by a French clockmaker. A second table clock now in the British Museum, London,[15] one of the few clocks by Newsam known to survive, supports this supposition. Its movement is closely allied to a sixteenth-century French variety of clock in which the going and striking trains are laid out one above the other with the going train at the top just below the bell.



Unlike the French-influenced ornament engraved on the sides of the British Museum’s clock, the band of ornament that encircles the Metropolitan Museum’s clock bears a strong resemblance to ornament prints (fig. 19) by the Nürnberg goldsmith and engraver Virgil Solis (1514–1562).[16] The band of crisply engraved and chased ornament of the Museum’s clock may, in fact, have been the product of a South German craftsman working in London. There is no name or signature to support the speculation, but it is known that foreign craftsmen, especially émigrés from the Low Countries, as well as from France and Germany, found a ready reception for their talents among sixteenth-century London goldsmiths.[17] The design of plump foliate arabesques punctuated by portrait roundels was certainly not new to the English in any case, and the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger, who died in London in 1543, left a drawing for a gold cup and cover made for the marriage of King Henry VIII to Jane Seymour in 1536 in which a band of ornament around the waist of the cup prefigures the Solis designs.[18] Holbein’s designs must also have had a lasting effect on English taste.



The strapwork of the dome of the Metropolitan Museum’s clock is an unusual example of another older variety of ornament, one originating in the Low Countries in the 1540s, for example, in ornamental engravings by the Dutch artist Cornelis Bos (ca. 1510–1556). The style eventually lost its connection to the conceit of depicting and curling strips of leather (hence the designation “strapwork”) to become the linear, almost abstract patterns found in the designs of printmakers and also on the dome of this clock.



The cylindrical case of boiled and molded leather (cuir-bouilli) with stamped ornament is most likely original to the clock and suggests that the timepiece was intended from the beginning to be used for traveling. The case opens at two levels, one about an inch and one half from the bottom and the second near the top. Both pieces are hinged. The bottom one, intended to be locked, has a gilded brass, shield-shaped keyhole escutcheon; the top one is secured at the front by a brass hook and- eye that opens for easy access to the dial of the clock.



A printed label on the underside of the leather case identifies the object as number 141 in the Hilton Price Collection. Frederick George Hilton Price was the British banker who probably sold the table clock to J. Pierpont Morgan about the same time Morgan acquired Hilton Price’s watch collection sometime before 1911. The clock and case are believed to have been owned earlier by W. Jerdone Braikenridge in Somerset, England.



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] Beeson 1971, pp. 15–17.

[2] For a translation from the Latin, with commentary, see Richard of Wallingford 1976, vol. 1, pp. 441–526.

[3] See Cipolla 1967, p. 51, who suggested that the makers of both clocks might have been foreign. For their probable Flemish origin, see Fraiture and Van Rompay 2011, p. 29.

[4] For a succinct summary of a lecture by David Thompson on watchmakers working in sixteenth-century England, see Hutchinson 2011.

[5] Acc. no. 17.190.1549. See Vincent and Leopold 2009.

[6] See Leopold and Vincent 2000.

[7] Portions of his will are cited in Britten 1982, p. 316; Jagger 1983, p. 13; Thompson 2004, p. 38.

[8] Finch 2004, p. 677.

[9] Jagger 1983, p. 13.

[10] There is some disagreement about the date of the will. Finch has stated that Newsam’s will is dated Jan. 7, 1587, but the will itself is dated Jan. 7, 1585, in the 29th year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (new style 1586, but not 1587). See Finch 2004, p. 678. Newsam’s will, probated on Dec. 18, 1593, Neville Quire Numbers 48–96, Public Record

Office, National Archives.

[11] Finch 2004, p. 677; see also Britten 1982, p. 316.

[12] Jagger 1983, p. 13.

[13] Finch 2004, p. 678. Confusion may have arisen about the date because it took until 1593 for Newsam’s will to be probated. See Ponsford 2008, p. 810.

[14] For examples of the type, see Tardy 1981a, pp. 75–83.

[15] Inv. no. 188812-1.126. See Thompson 2004, pp. 38–39.

[16] O’Dell-Franke 1977, p. 160, nos. h 79, h 80, and pl. 99.

[17] Glanville 1990, pp. 185–96.

[18] Now in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,inv. no. WA1863.424. See ibid., p. 92, and p. 93, fig. 36; Schroder 2009, vol. 1, p. 62, and p. 63, fig. 20.