BOOKS FOR COLLECTORS

With Frontispieces and many Illustrations
Large Crown 8vo, cloth.

• CHATS ON ENGLISH CHINA.
  By Arthur Hayden.
• CHATS ON OLD FURNITURE.
  By Arthur Hayden.
• CHATS ON OLD PRINTS.
  (How to collect and value Old Engravings.)
  By Arthur Hayden.
• CHATS ON COSTUME.
  By G. Woolliscroft Rhead.
• CHATS ON OLD LACE AND NEEDLEWORK.
  By E. L. Lowes.
• CHATS ON ORIENTAL CHINA.
  By J. F. Blacker.
• CHATS ON OLD MINIATURES.
  By J. J. Foster, F.S.A.
• CHATS ON ENGLISH EARTHENWARE.
  (Companion volume to "Chats on English China.")
  By Arthur Hayden.
• CHATS ON AUTOGRAPHS.
  By A. M. Broadley.
• CHATS ON PEWTER.
  By H. J. L. J. Massé, M.A.
• CHATS ON POSTAGE STAMPS.
  By Fred. J. Melville.
• CHATS ON OLD JEWELLERY AND TRINKETS
  By MacIver Percival.
• CHATS ON COTTAGE AND FARMHOUSE FURNITURE.
  (Companion volume to "Chats on Old Furniture.")
  By Arthur Hayden.
• CHATS ON OLD COINS.
  By Fred. W. Burgess.
• CHATS ON OLD COPPER AND BRASS.
  By Fred. W. Burgess.
• CHATS ON HOUSEHOLD CURIOS.
  By Fred. W. Burgess.
• CHATS ON OLD SILVER.
  By Arthur Hayden.
• CHATS ON JAPANESE PRINTS.
  By Arthur Davison Ficke.
• CHATS ON MILITARY CURIOS.
  By Stanley C. Johnson.
• CHATS ON OLD CLOCKS AND WATCHES.
  By Arthur Hayden.

LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.,
NEW YORK: F. A. STOKES COMPANY.

Chats on Old Clocks

BY

ARTHUR HAYDEN

AUTHOR OF "CHATS ON COTTAGE AND FARMHOUSE FURNITURE,"
"CHATS ON OLD PRINTS," ETC.

WITH A FRONTISPIECE AND 80 ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN LTD.
ADELPHI TERRACE

First published in 1917

(All rights reserved)

[DEDICATION]

Time, you laggard, take my little book,

And point to those who have a curious mind

That record herein they may hidden find

Of Huygens' wordy war with Dr. Hooke:

Of David Ramsay's search for secret hoard:

Of Thomas Chamberlaine de Chelmisforde.

Many a maker left his graven name,—

That by your leave stands yet on dial plate,—

With legend Fecit, of uncertain date,

Proud with the hope that time would bring him fame.

Death stopped the wheels of maker and machine:

Time! will you not their memory keep green?

Time, take my tribute to your flying feet;

Paper will shortly crumble into dust.

You guard the guerdon free from moth and rust,

Your even finger sifts the chaff from wheat;

Hold me from hurt, I worship at your shrine

With every pulse-beat,—Father, make me thine.

A.H.

[PREFACE]

A preface should be personal. An author who writes on such subjects as Old Furniture and Old China, with a view to educating public taste and attempting to show why certain objects should be regarded more lovingly than others, meets with a volume of correspondence from collectors. Threaded through such correspondence, extended over a long period, I find the constant demand for a volume dealing with old clocks in a popular manner.

There is no house without its clock or clocks, and few collectors of old furniture have excluded clocks from their hobby. I have been therefore blamed that I did not include some more detailed treatment of clocks in my volumes on "Old Furniture" and "Cottage and Farmhouse Furniture," my readers very justly advancing the argument that clocks form part of the study of domestic furniture as a whole.

This may be admitted. But in the endeavour to satisfy such a want on the part of my clients, I plead that the subject of clockmaking is one to which years of study must be devoted.

Since the first appearance of my Chats on Old Furniture in 1905, I have not been unmindful of the co-related subject of old clocks. Over ten years of study, running parallel with my other work on the evolution of ornament and decoration of the English home, has enabled me to gather a mass of material and to attempt to satisfy the request for a complementary volume to my Chats on Old Furniture and Chats on Cottage and Farmhouse Furniture.

To this end I have embodied in this present volume many facts relating to provincial styles as well as Scottish and Irish types, with lists of local makers not before published.

To the critics to whom I have hitherto been indebted for realizing the niche I desire to fill with my volumes, I preface this volume by stating that as far as possible the technicalities of clockmaking have been eliminated. The average reader and the average collector would be bored by such details, although some of us might like to see them included. I have not referred to foreign clockmaking, nor to famous church and turret clocks, nor to marvels of horology; I have advisedly limited my field to the English domestic clock. That such a treatment would appeal more to the collector is my personal opinion, and I trust my critics may incline to my view.

The illustrations in the volume have been chosen to illustrate the letterpress and to illuminate points I endeavour to make in regard to the evolution of the various types coming under my observation.

I have to express my indebtedness to the authorities of the British Museum for permission to include illustrations of examples in that collection, and I am similarly indebted to the authorities of the National Museum, Dublin.

By the courtesy of the Corporation of Nottingham I am reproducing a clock in their collection, and similarly by the courtesy of the Bristol Corporation I am including an example in their possession. The Corporation of Glasgow have afforded me permission to include a remarkable example of Scottish work, and the authorities of the Metropolitan Museum, New York, have accorded me a similar privilege in illustrating specimens in their collection.

Among those who have generously augmented my researches and come to my aid in regard to local makers, I desire to express my obligation to George H. Hewitt, Esq., J.P., of Liverpool, who arranged the clocks in the exhibit at the Liverpool Tercentenary Exhibition in 1907, and to E. Rimbault Dibdin, Esq., of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. To Basil Anderton, Esq., of the Public Libraries, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and to T. Leo Reid, Esq., of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I am especially grateful for solid help in regard to North Country makers. To H. Tapley-Soper, Esq., City Librarian, Exeter, I am indebted for names of West-Country makers, and to A. Bromley Sanders, Esq., of Exeter, I am obliged for information relating to local clocks coming under his purview for many years. James Davies, Esq., of Chester, and S. H. Hamer, Esq., of Halifax, have enlarged my horizon in regard to local makers. H. Wingent, Esq., of Rochester, an enthusiastic collector and connoisseur of old clocks, has kindly enabled me to reproduce one of his examples. To Herbert Bolton, Esq., of the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, I am indebted for the inclusion of a fine specimen in that collection.

I desire especially to record the generous aid I have had from Percy Webster, Esq., of Great Portland Street, London, who is well known as a connoisseur of old clocks, and from his son, Malcolm R. Webster, Esq., who have given me practical assistance in regard to verifying facts from actual examples.

To Thomas Rennie, Esq., of the Glasgow Art Galleries and Museums, I desire to record thanks. To Edward Campbell, Esq., of Glasgow, who has enriched my volume with examples of Scottish work in his collection, I am indebted for information regarding Scottish makers embodied in this volume.

I am, by the kindness of John Smith, Esq., of Edinburgh, author of Old Scottish Clockmakers, and of his publisher, William J. Hay, Esq., John Knox's House, Edinburgh, enabled to produce names and dates of certain Scottish makers not recorded elsewhere. In this connection my friend William R. Miller, Esq., of Leith, has spared no time to help me to do justice to Scottish makers, and I am especially grateful to him for his kindly enthusiasm. He was there at the "chap o' the knok" when I asked his help.

Westropp Dudley, Esq., of the National Museum, Dublin, has extended to me his courtesy in enabling the inclusion of Irish makers coming under his research. To Arthur Deane, Esq., of the Public Art Gallery and Museum, Belfast, I am similarly obliged for data relative to old Belfast clockmakers.

To the many friends who have during an extended period generously supplemented my own studies by supplying me with data in regard to provincial makers and other hitherto unelucidated matters, I wish to offer my cordial thanks.

To my readers in general, whether they be collectors of old English china or earthenware, of furniture, or of prints, or of old silver, I desire to record my appreciation of their kindness in regard to my volumes on these subjects. I have honestly endeavoured to treat each sub-head concerning the evolution of design in the English home with sane reasoning, and I trust with ripe judgment. I have assiduously collected facts and studiously attempted to marshal them, each by each, according to relative value. Popular my volumes may be, but it is my hope that they may contribute something of permanent value to the subjects with which they deal.

ARTHUR HAYDEN.

[CONTENTS]

[ILLUSTRATIONS]

[CHAPTER I]

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Time and its measurement—Day and night—Early mechanism—The domestic clock—The personal clock—Rapid phases of invention—The dawn of science—The great English masters of clockmaking—The several branches of a great art—What to value and what to collect—Hints for beginners.

The dictionary definition of "clock" is interesting. Clock.—A machine for measuring time, marking the time by the position of its hands upon the dial-plate, or by the striking of a hammer on a bell. Probably from old French or from Low Latin, cloca, clocca, a bell. Dutch, klok. German, glocke, a bell.

This is exact as far as it goes, but the thought seizes one, how did it come about that man attempted to measure time? He saw the sunrise and he watched the fading sunset till "Hesperus with the host of heaven came," and the night melted again into the dawn. Nature marked definitely the hours of light and hours of darkness. That was a law over which he had no control. Similarly he watched the seasons—the spring, the summer, the autumn, and the winter; this gave him the annual calendar. It becomes a matter of curious speculation how it came to pass that man divided the year into twelve months, and how he came to give a name to each day, and to determine seven as forming a week. Similarly one is curiously puzzled as to why he divided day and night into twenty-four parts, calling them hours.

These speculations lead us farther afield than the scope of this volume. An examination of Babylonian and Greek measurements of time is too abstruse to be included in a volume of this nature. Nor is it necessary, however interesting such may be, to record the astronomical observations at Bagdad of Ahmed ibn Abdullah.

We must commence with the known data that the earth revolves on its axis in twenty-four hours, or, to be more exact, in 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds. Astronomical clocks recording with scientific exactitude this phenomenon are on a plane apart, as are chronometers used by mariners. The astronomer uses a clock with numbers on its dial plate up to twenty-four; the common clock has only twelve hour numerals.

To come straight to modernity, it must be recognized that the measurement of time scientifically and the measurement of time according to civil law are two different things.

The mean Solar day used in the ordinary reckoning of time, by most modern nations, begins at midnight. Its hours are numbered in two series from 1 to 12—the first series, called A.M. (ante meridian), before midday, and the second series, P.M. (post meridian), after midday. This is a clumsy arrangement and leads to confusion. The leading railways of the world are beginning to use the series of twenty-four.

Let it be granted that the day consists of twenty-four hours, which is the apparent Solar day; the starting-point was not always the same. The Babylonians began their day at sunrise, the Athenians and Jews at sunset, the ancient Egyptians and Romans at midnight.

In passing, it should be noted that the day is measured astronomically by recording the period of the revolution of the earth on its axis, determined by the interval of time between two successive transits of the sun, the moon, or a fixed star over the same meridian.

The Solar day is exactly 24 hours, the Lunar day is 24 hours 50 minutes, and the Sidereal day is 23 hours 56 minutes.

Apparent Solar Time is shown by the sundial, and therefore depends upon the motion of the sun. Mean Solar Time is shown by a correct clock. The difference between Mean Time and Apparent Time, that is, between the time shown by the clock and the sundial, is called the Equation of Time, and in the Nautical Almanack, a Government publication, there are tables showing these differences.

Day and Night.—Obviously the hours of darkness offered a greater problem to the horologist than the hours of light. His sundial was of no use at night and of little use on cloudy days. The hour-glass was not a piece of mechanism a man would wish to employ to record the night watches. Some other self-acting mechanism had to be devised.

The interval between sunset and sunset, or sunrise and sunrise, or noon and noon, was divided by the Babylonians, who had a love for the duodenary system, into twenty-four hours. It is curious to read that "until the eighteenth century in England the hour was commonly reckoned as the twelfth part of the time between sunrise and sunset, or between sunset and sunrise, and hence was of varying durations" (Webster's New International Dictionary, 1914).

The hour was further divided, also by the Babylonians, into periods of sixty minutes. It was the Babylonians who first divided the circle into 360 degrees, and Ptolemy followed this division.

The dial of a clock was at first termed the hour-plate, as only hours were engraved upon it and only one hand was employed. Later, another hand was added, the minute hand, which travelled a complete circuit while the hour hand was travelling between two hour numerals. Later, again, a new sub-dial was added, and a seconds hand recorded the sixty seconds which made the minute. The term "second" was at first called "second-minute," denoting that it was the second division of an hour by sixty. The learned John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, that extraordinary old savant, writes in 1650: "Four flames of an equal magnitude will be kept alive the space of sixteen second-minutes, though one of these flames alone, in the same vessel, will not last at most above twenty-five or thirty seconds."

These dry facts may serve to whet the curiosity of the student in regard to the measurement of time and its origin. They add a piquancy to the clock dial as we now know it. Scientific it is, as one of man's most exact recorders of natural phenomena. That an exact timekeeper should be found in the pocket of every schoolboy would seem an astounding miracle to our ancestors two hundred years ago, or even less than a hundred years ago:

'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none

Go just alike, yet each believes his own,

writes Pope in his Essay on Criticism in 1725.

This is a damning indictment of the accuracy of watches in the early eighteenth century, but Dickens in Dombey and Son suggests equally faulty mechanism not in true accord with the mean solar day:

"Wal'r ... a parting gift, my lad. Put it back half an hour every morning, and about another quarter towards the arternoon, and it's a watch that'll do you credit."

That the civil day has taken precedence of the solar day is shown by the recent legislation in regard to Summer Time. "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath," may be applied to the clock dial. By an Act of Parliament, in spite of science and the earth's revolution on its axis, the hands straightway mean something else. It is well that modern clocks have no wise saws and mottoes telling of the unalterable hand of Time; "Old Time, the clock-setter, that bald sexton, Time," as Shakespeare says in King John.

Early Mechanism.—The problem for the old clockmakers who wished to supplant the primitive measurement of time by candle, by the hour-glass, and later by the sundial, was to produce a piece of mechanism which would in twenty-four hours, the prescribed period of day and night, indicate the flight of time hour by hour.

In rapid survey we cannot pause to enter into details. The first clocks indicated the hour alone by a hand attached to the axis of a wheel. In the twelfth century a new mechanism was added to strike a bell with a hammer, showing the hours indicated by the hand. At first the motive power was a weight acting upon toothed wheels. In the fifteenth century a spiral spring placed in a barrel replaced the weight attached to a string as the motive power. This led to portable clocks of smaller dimensions being possible.

The sixteenth century is remarkable for the great advance by Italian, by Nuremberg, and by Augsburg clockmakers. Striking and alarum clocks, and intricate mechanism showing phases of the moon, the year, the day of the month, and the festivals of the Church, were produced. In the sixteenth century portable clocks received further attention in regard to minute mechanism, resulting in what we now know as the watch. The moment this point was reached, ornamentation of a rich and elaborate character was applied to such objects of art, then only in the possession of princes and nobles and the richest classes of society.

In the middle of the seventeenth century Huygens, the celebrated Dutch astronomer and mathematician, brought great modification in the art of clockmaking by applying the pendulum to clocks in order to regulate the movement, "and adapting, some years later, to the balance of watches a spring, which produced upon this balance the same effect as that of the weight upon the pendulum" (Labarte, Arts of the Middle Ages).

In old clocks there is a verge escapement with a cross-bar balanced by weights. This was in the top portion of the clock.

When the pendulum was introduced it was first placed in front of the clock and swung backwards and forwards across the face of the dial, being only some six inches in length, and more frequently it is found at the back of the clock, outside the case. See illustration (p. [51]) of examples.

As it was easy safely to convert the old form of balance into pendulum form, with hanging weight or weights, this was frequently done. So frequently, in fact, that very few of the old balance movements remain. See illustration (p. [57]) of lantern clock with weights and pendulum.

With the advent of the "royal" or long pendulum, the domestic clock came into being.

We now arrive at the first period of the English domestic clock, and from this point a fairly definite record of styles and changes can be made.

The Domestic Clock.—This may be said to be the clock in use in a great house, apart from the cathedral or church clock, the turret clock, or the more public clock common to the gaze of everybody. The nobility employed, on the Continent and in this country, great clockmakers to produce these new scientific timekeepers for use in their private apartments. But there came another phase when the clock visible to the dependent was supplanted by more delicate mechanism of greater value and of richer ornamentation.

The Personal Clock.—This was the watch. It was carried on the person. It was the gift of a lover to his mistress. It was a rich and rare jewel of scientific construction, set in crystal, embellished with enamel and other rich decoration. In a measure it supplanted the clock and drove it on to a lower plane.

It demanded craftsmanship of the highest character to create these masterpieces of horology, and the art has been continued in a separate stream to that of clockmaking up to the present day. The watch is not the small clock, nor is the clock the large watch. Whatever may have been their common origin, each has developed on lines essentially proper for the technique. As the clock has developed in mechanical perfection, so the watch has similarly kept in parallel progress towards the same ideal, that of the perfect timekeeper.

A long succession of mechanical inventions is attached to the clock, and similarly the watch has demanded equal genius till both arrive at modernity.

The Dawn of Science.—The mid-seventeenth century the post-Bacon period, when Newton became President of the Royal Society, may be said to be the dawn of science in this country. The Aristotelian method of analysis and the practical experiment set men's minds into scientific channels. The scientific clockmaker was the product of this period of restless activity. Science was in leading-strings. Prince Rupert's Drops, so familiar now, were a scientific wonder. Bishop Wilkins and Evelyn, Locke and Dr. Harvey, were all, from different points, attempting to unravel the secrets of nature. The Tudor Age had opened the New World; the next century was left to discover the untravelled paths of science and mechanism. Invention was being suckled by Curiosity. Invention only came to manhood in the nineteenth century.

The Great English Masters of Clockmaking.—There is the mythical claim for Richard Harris, who is said to have invented the first pendulum clock in Europe, fixed in the turret of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, in 1640 or earlier. The Huygens pendulum was hung by a silken cord, and the arc described by the bob or weight at its end was a segment of a circle. Dr. Hooke invented the thin, flexible steel support of the pendulum, producing more scientific accuracy. In 1658 he invented the anchor escapement, which, together with his spring to the pendulum, is still used, although the "dead-beat" escapement invented by George Graham has supplanted the "anchor" in timekeepers requiring greater exactitude.

In regard to Robert Hooke and his claim to being the inventor of the balance spring for watches, an invention claimed by Christopher Huygens de Zulichem, there is an acrimonious dispute and lengthy correspondence thereon. The Royal Society had published in their Philosophical Transactions for March 25th, 1675, the discovery of Huygens, who visited England in 1661 and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. Dr. Hooke protested. It appears that one of the "ballance double watches" was presented to Charles II and was inscribed "Robert Hooke inven. 1658. T. Tompion fecit 1675." There is the record that George Graham declared that he "had heard Tompion say he was employed three months that year by Mr. Hooke in making some parts of these watches before he let him know for what use they were designed, and that Tompion was used to say he thought the first invention of them was owing to Mr. Hooke." [1]

To come to the great masters of the art of English clockmaking. In the transactions of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers it is recorded that "in July 1704 it was by the Master reported that certain persons at Amsterdam are in the habit of putting the names of Tompion, Windmills, Quare, Cabrier, Lamb, and other well-known makers on their works and selling them as English." [2] A committee was appointed to put an end to such abuses.

[ [1] Life of Robert Hooke, by R. Waller, 1705. Biographica Britannica.

[ [2]Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers of the City of London, by Samuel Elliott Atkins and Henry Overall, F.S.A., 1881 (British Museum Library, 10349 gg. 11).

Here then we have five of the leading English clockmakers in 1704, to which we can add George Graham, the inventor of the "orrery," named after his patron, Robert Boyle, Earl of Cork and Orrery, and to make the number up to twenty-five we add the following. These men are in the first flight. Ahasuerus Fromanteel (and the family of Fromanteel, of Dutch origin), the first to introduce the pendulum into England; Edward East; Joseph Knibb, father and son; William Dutton, Matthew and Thomas Dutton, John Ebsworth, John Harrison, J. Grant, Stephen Rimbault, Thomas Earnshaw, John Arnold, Thomas Mudge, Christopher Pinchbeck, William Tomlinson, Justin Vulliamy, and Benjamin and Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy.

In Old Clocks and Watches and their Makers, by the late F. J. Britten, there is a list of some ten thousand names of clockmakers, so that examples coming in the possession of collectors can readily be checked by this list. But the fact that a maker's name is not in this directory does not exclude him from recognition as a master, though possibly he may not be one of the great masters.

The Several Branches of a Great Art.—The timekeeper—whether it be the scientific astronomical clock, or the chronometer used by mariners, or the modern watch, minute in size but recording time with accuracy, or the bracket or table clock, or the long-case clock—has proceeded on parallel lines of development. These types represent the several branches of the great art of clockmaking.

Clockmakers and watchmakers very soon specialized when the correct standard had been reached, and further inventions effected economy in mechanism rather than drastic changes in principle making for further exactitude. Specialization may be said to have undone clockmaking. We realize that the clockmaker could not cast the brass spandrel ornaments and chase them, or engrave the dial. We do not expect him to, nor did he, lay the marquetry, or become a lacquer varnisher in the cases. We cannot call upon him to cast the bell in the chiming movement, or to make the catgut which is wound around the drum carrying the weights. Nor was he an expert in metal design to pierce the hands and employ delicate ornament in so doing. Perhaps we may forgive him employing a special trade to supply him with delicate springs. But the factory system of the middle nineteenth century began to eat into the vitals of clockmaking in this country as a scientific craft. Makers of wheels, makers of chains, makers of every conceivable part of the movement sprang into being. No one of whom was a clockmaker, and no unit of any such industry could put a clock together. The clockmaker, and even then there is something personal yet remaining, became an assembler of component parts. He certainly understood the completed whole and made the wheels move and the hands record exact and perfect time. That is something, and it is a very great thing too. But how shorn of his former glory is the clockmaker in these conditions!

In this volume we deal with the collecting period, which is the stage prior to this, but it is possible to look ahead as well as backward. Factory-made clocks will be made, perfect timekeepers without doubt. But there is still the great possibility that the clockmaker may seize his own and wrest the laurels from the impersonal syndicate. To him who can add personality to a clock—that something which parts put together with mechanical precision lack—there awaits a glorious heritage. The soul of the living clock must echo the soul of its human maker. The old masters have left to posterity living organisms which will not die. It rests with the public to say whether they prefer the gramophone to the singer, the piano-player to the accomplished pianist. If the clock of tomorrow is to be a mere soulless machine, the demand will be met. But if it is to revert to that higher plane of the old masters of clockmaking, it is for those who love beauty and truth to make their desires imperative. For the moment, therefore, the study of the old and the perfect claims the loving attention of the collector who sees new lamps, like those which the magician in Aladdin's palace proffered for sale, in place of old.

What to Value and what to Collect.—The appreciation of old clocks is a natural gift. To one his mezzotints, to another his Chelsea china, to another his old silver plate. But to all lovers of fine furniture the English clock appeals sympathetically. It has a twofold claim to recognition. It is, if it be a fine old English clock by an English maker, a reliable piece of mechanism as a timekeeper. It is in certain periods representative, in its marquetry or lacquered case, of styles of decoration and design now only equalled by copyists. If it is by one of the leading English clockmakers its movements are unequalled. It stands as a monument to a great scientific craftsmanship now almost extinct. The great English clockmakers of the first flight "were not of an age but for all time."

Roughly speaking, the first twenty-five years of the eighteenth century and the first thirty-five years of the nineteenth century represent two periods when the clockmaker was doing splendid work. The clocks of the intervening period are of value as representing work of extreme carefulness, and are of course worthy of the attention and admiration of the collector.

In the first period a crowd of skilled scientific clockmakers followed each other in rapid succession and brought the art of horology to perfection. During this first period the clock cases and the clock dials came under artistic impulses not since equalled. It therefore follows that for these two reasons the clocks of the first period are most highly appreciated and are of great value.

The second period, that is, the first thirty-five years of the nineteenth century, represents an era of established and sound technique, exhibiting craftsmanship of a high order struggling for supremacy and recognition at a time when factory inventions and factory-made substitutes commenced to dominate not only the art of the clockmaker but other personal crafts. During this time the case and the dial cannot be said to possess the high artistic qualities found in the earlier period. Art was beginning to sink into the Slough of Despond which for half a century characterized most European arts, both fine and applied.

Hints for Beginners.—To set out to buy an old clock is for the tyro like setting out to buy a horse. In the latter case the teeth may be filed and the hoofs pared to give a simulation of youth to which possibly the beast could not lay claim. In the former, added touches would counterfeit antiquity: here a pair of apparently old hands, there an antiquated-looking dial, and an enshrining case of no particular period, but seeming to bear Time's own impress of age, till one is inclined to say, to quote the Merchant of Venice: "I never knew so young a body with so old a head."

The following chapters will indicate the outline of a complex and intricate subject. The case, the dial, the hands, all have to be studied with no little skill in comparison and deduction in regard to errors in clumsy repairers or unskilled restorers, who with vandal hands have destroyed the balance of fine work and introduced component parts which are harlequin to the trained collector's eye. This much for the visible. Then there is the movement, that is, the mechanism which makes the clock a clock. This is unseen by the average snapper-up of old clocks, or when seen not understood. There are those collectors who stop short in their requirements. A clock is an ornament to a well appointed home, in the hall, in the smoking-room, or in the dining-room. They are unconcerned as to whether it is a timekeeper or a monument, "long to be patient and silent to wait like a ghost that is speechless." One longs to call aloud to such an encumbrance with its dead wheels and its atrophied hands: "Watchman! What of the night?" It is a servant that serves no longer. It is like a poor relation thrusting his company upon his fellow-guests with dumb tongue and a solemn demeanour telling of former glories.

But the sane modern collector wants an old clock not because it is old, but because he rightly has assumed that there are certain qualities of the old clockmaker's art which are not to be found in later periods. Wise in his generation, he places himself not in the hands of a dealer who has sold a thousand clocks, but in the hands of a practical clockmaker who has made one. A trained man having a knowledge of old movements, and to whom they are something more than inanimate objects, will advise the collector. To such a man a clock is something with a soul. To him one goes who will set the silent wheels moving and endow the dead clockmaker's heritage with pulsating life.

But—the word of warning cannot be too strongly sounded to all possessors of old clocks. Every year fine examples of old work are ruined for ever by ignorant repairers and restorers. In their little day they have destroyed movements and parts which can never be replaced. Of all arts, the art of the clockmaker has suffered most at the hands of the modern destroyer of work he does not understand.

[CHAPTER II]

THE BRASS LANTERN CLOCK

The domestic clock—Its use as a bracket or wall clock—Seventeenth-century types—Continuance of manufacture in provinces—Their appeal to the collector.

The form of the lantern clock is one that appeals to the artist. We love the candelabrum with candles, with its finely, fashioned brass forms, Dutch and English. It adds a grace to the interiors of the old masters of the Low Countries. Nobody is especially interested in the gas bracket or the paraffin lamp. There is the picture of The Doctor by Luke Fildes, but here the lamp only adds to the poverty and anguish of the scene. It is realistic and had to be there, and it makes a great factor in the lighting. But the chandelier with candles is the most beloved by the artist who inclines to the primitive, as we all do. The electric light must come into art and it does. The lift and the telephone are facts, but they are difficult, naked and unashamed as they are, to clothe with æsthetic drapery. The cubist and the modern pseudo-scientific realist revel in incongruities repellent to art. They seize these as their own, and make them in their presentation more repellent.

Happily the clock has not received the attention of the modern sensation-monger. We are left with the heritage of the past undisturbed. He may gibe at the paint and canvas of old masters, he may deride the grace of the Greek in sculpture, but the simple mechanism of the clock symbolizing "the inaudible and noiseless foot of Time" mocks the charlatan of a little day, with oblivion tracking his scurrying heels.

The name of lantern clock may puzzle the modern collector, but its shape followed the lantern of the period, and, like the lantern, it was made to hang on the wall. We illustrate (p. [47]) a silver ship's lantern of the period of Christian IV of Denmark, of the late sixteenth century, with the King's monogram. It was doubtless used in the expedition round the North Cape. It is in the collection at Rosenborg Castle at Copenhagen. This lantern shape is found in German clocks of the period, and in English seventeenth-century clocks the same shape is continued. A fine example by Bartholomew Newsam is illustrated (p. [47]), showing the early type conforming to the lantern design.

Not only the form but the usage determined the name. The lantern had spikes or metal hooks to hang upon. The clock similarly was affixed to a wall, and we know it as a bracket clock, because, whether on a wall or on a bracket, it had chains and weights suspended beneath it, as it was not in its early form capable of being placed on a table.

SHIP'S LANTERN OF SILVER.
Used by Christian IV of Denmark on his voyage round the North Cape.
(At Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen.)

EARLY LANTERN CLOCK.
By Bartholomew Newsam (1570-90).
(At British Museum. Reproduced by permission.)

We think lovingly of it as belonging to a past that is something more than tapestry figures moving in a misty background. To watch the revolving pinions of a Stuart clock is to hear the echoes of the past reverberate. It requires no gramophone to reproduce dead voices, nor a cinema picture to recall bygone incidents and happenings. One can listen to the same monotone calling forth the departure of the seconds that awakened George Herbert from a reverie and beat rhythmically to his carefully wrought verse. The same hand pointed to midnight that beckoned Lovelace from his revels. We are reminded of Justice Shallow's "we have heard the chimes at midnight,"—an old man's boast of rollicking gaiety. The trite engraved words Tempus fugit drew a thousand sweet sounds from golden-mouthed Herrick, who sang of fading roses and counselled maids "with Daffodils and Daisies crowned" to make the most of their charms. Vanitas vanitatum, all is vanity; the sadness of it all, the flying hours that no man can recall, the long slow shadow that creeps across the grass—this is the message of the poets; and when they pause for a moment from the dance in the sunlight to think of time, it is Time the ancient reaper with the scythe, who cuts down the young flowers ruthlessly with the fateful sweep of his blade.

Its Use as a Bracket or Wall Clock.—Old engravings of clocks and of clockmakers' workshops show clocks on the wall with the weights suspended beneath the brass case. Such a clock usually went for thirty hours. That is, it was usual to wind it by pulling up the chains once a day, a method retained, in long-case clocks of thirty-hour duration, by provincial makers a couple of centuries later in England.

It is obvious that these clocks stand apart from the era of the spring as a driving force, being weight-driven, and are before the introduction of the pendulum as a regulator of the mechanism impelled by the weights.

As timekeepers they never can bear comparison with the later type with the long pendulum. They stand as examples of early clockmaking, with fine brass dials, with artistic appearance, simple and unpretentious, but lacking the real scientific application of further developed principles of a succeeding period.

A clock that could only be used as a bracket clock or a wall clock with weights beneath hardly filled the requirements of an age when domestic furniture demanded luxury and exquisite taste. The personal clock—that is, the watch—offered more possibilities.

The advent of the pendulum came just at a time when the art of the clockmaker required the necessary impetus to carry him to newer and more extended fields. The invention revolutionized the domestic clock.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BRASS CLOCK.
With pendulum in front of dial.
(At British Museum. Reproduced by permission.)

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BRASS CLOCK.
With pendulum behind back plate of clock.

As to the clocks used by the wealthy classes in England at the year 1685, one recalls the death-bed scene of Charles II as described by Macaulay: "The morning light began to peep through the windows of Whitehall; and Charles desired the attendants to pull aside the curtains, that he might have one more look at the day. He remarked that it was time to wind up a clock that stood near his bed. These little circumstances were long remembered, because they proved beyond dispute that, when he declared himself a Roman Catholic, he was in full possession of his faculties. He apologized to those who had stood round him all night for the trouble which he caused. He had been, he said, a most unconscionable time dying; but he hoped that they would excuse it. This was the last glimpse of that exquisite urbanity so often found potent to charm away the resentment of a justly incensed nation. Soon after dawn the speech of the dying man failed."

It was Bacon who wrote, a century before: "If a man be in sickness or pain, the time will seem longer without a clock or hour-glass than with it."

The question arises as to what particular kind of clock was at the bedside of Charles II that he should notice that it required winding. It may have been usual to wind it at that particular time every morning, being, as it undoubtedly was, a thirty-hour clock conveniently wound the same time every day. But it is more probable that the King saw that it wanted winding by the position of the weights.

Seventeenth-century Types.—The idea of the pendulum had been in men's minds since the days of Leonardo da Vinci, but Christopher Huygens, the Dutch astronomer and mechanician, applied it to the clock. At first it was placed in front of the dial and swung from the top. The illustration we give (p. [51]) shows an early clock with this device. The pendulum was next placed at the back (see adjacent illustration, p. [51]), and later inside the clock.

We illustrate several types of the lantern clock showing its changing form from a slender and graceful clock, with the dial in correct proportion, to the later type, when the dial projected beyond the body of the clock. When the bell was placed at the top and ornamented by a brass terminal, the name applied to the clock was "birdcage," and pictures by the old Dutch masters show birdcages of this shape hanging in ladies' boudoirs.

It will be observed that as a rule the dials are circular, consisting of the hour plate without the four spandrels. But we illustrate an example of a square dial by John Bushman, London, about 1680, with crown and verge escapement, with short pendulum, and alarum with striking and going trains run by same weight. It will be observed that these clocks have only one hand—the hour hand. In the example above mentioned (see Frontispiece), the dial has an inner circle showing quarters of an hour. The hand, as illustrated, has passed one quarter and half of the next; it is therefore about twenty-two and a half minutes past three. There is also an alarum marked with arabic figures one to twelve. (An enlargement of this dial is illustrated p. [163])

The other specimens we illustrate exhibit slightly varying characteristics.

BRASS LANTERN CLOCK, WITH SINGLE HAND.
Thirty hours; striking, but no alarum. With chains and weights beneath; short pendulum at back.
Date, about 1660. Maker, Daniel Quare (London).

BRASS LANTERN CLOCK, WITH TWO HANDS.
Thirty hours; striking and alarum. Anchor pendulum with wings each side and chains and weight below clock. Short pendulum at back.
Date, about 1670.

BRASS LANTERN CLOCK.
Showing chains with weights and long pendulum.
Date, about 1700.
(At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.)

The brass lantern clock illustrated (p. [55]) has chains and weights. It is a thirty-hour clock, with striking but no alarum movement. It has a short pendulum behind the back plate.

The use of an anchor-shaped pendulum brought a winged screen into fashion to conceal its movement. The example illustrated (p. [55]) shows this style. This also is a bracket clock with chains supporting the weights.

But the bracket clock did not stop at this stage. On the introduction of the long or seconds pendulum this new mechanism was embodied in brass clocks, and the illustration (p. [57]) of an example about 1700 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, shows this type. A fine brass lantern clock by Thomas Tompion is at the British Museum, an illustration of which is given (p. [61]).

Continuance of Manufacture in the Provinces.—Long after the long-case clock was in general use in London, the brass clock with weights and pendulum was extensively made in the provinces. Examples are found by local makers up to the early years of the nineteenth century. In a measure this continuance of an obsolete form is parallel with the village cabinet-maker's furniture. Generation after generation produced oak chairs and settles in Stuart form, and when Chippendale seized the world of fashion, it was not till long afterwards that village craftsmen made chairs in the Chippendale manner—but in yew, in beech, and in sycamore, never in mahogany. Even Sheraton's satinwood elegance in delicate tapered legs found an echo in elm and beech. It is such naïveté which is delightful to the collector, and in provincial clocks he will find a study equally rewarded by extraordinary anachronisms and singular adaptations within the compass of the local maker.

For instance, the marquetry of the village carpenter is always a hundred years behind the time. His engraving on dials is of the same character as that on his local coffin-plates or his tombstones. His painted dials often exhibit native touches difficult to equal.

Their Appeal to Collectors.—Anything that appeals to collectors, whether it be Morland's colour prints or Wheatley's Cries of London, old Sheffield plate, Stuart cane-back chairs or Sheraton tea-caddies, pays the usual tribute which the antique pays to posterity. As imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, a thousand replicas start up to supply a demand. The man of taste says that such and such a thing is unique in its art-appeal to him. The man of money seeks to prove that it is not unique and buys as many uniques and antiques as his distended banking account will allow. We find this applies to lantern clocks. Birmingham has turned out thousands of these brass clocks in replica of seventeenth-century styles. Sometimes as much as ten pounds is asked for them, and sometimes it is found that an old maker's name has been added to the dial. There is no particular harm in any man having replicas of fine old objects of art in his house if he likes the styles and cannot afford originals. But it is a pity that any one should ever pay more than replica price for a copy. That is foolishness, and outside the realm of collecting.

BRASS LANTERN CLOCK.
Maker, Thomas Tompion (1671-1713). Height 8¾ inches.
(At British Museum. Reproduced by permission.)

Perhaps it is a wise dispensation of Providence that the man of wealth can possess the originals and that the poor man and the man of taste must content himself with copies. It was Balzac who chalked up in his garret, "Here is a Velasquez," "Here is an Andrea del Sarto." Lovers of the real can impart to the modern replicas purchased for a few pounds the spirit of the old examples. It is the same artistic impulse which accepts the translation in lieu of the original. Through FitzGerald we read Omar. Horatius Flaccus, who appeals to the esoteric with his odi profanum vulgus, is filtered through a Western tongue. One is grateful to see plaster casts in the British Museum of the Three Fates from the Parthenon at Athens. Echoes suggest so much to those who have the inner spirit to conjure up the original.

[CHAPTER III]

THE LONG-CASE CLOCK—THE PERIOD OF VENEER AND MARQUETRY

What is veneer?—What is marquetry?—The use of veneer and marquetry on long-case clocks—No common origin of design—Le style réfugié—Derivative nature of marquetry clock-cases—The wall-paper period—The incongruities of marquetry.

For some fifty years—that is, from about 1670, the date of the secret treaty of Charles II with Louis XIV, to about the year 1720, the early years of the reign of George I—there was a marked leaning towards colour in furniture as distinct from form. The solid English oak of early days and the later intricacies of walnut were dependent solely on form, either in carving or in elaborate turning, as in the Charles II and James II period, when the so-called "barley-sugar" pattern and other elaborate "corkscrew" turned legs added grace and beauty to furniture beginning to take its place beside the work of great European craftsmen.

In flattering imitation of continental schools, but more particularly the Dutch, English cabinet-makers commenced to inlay their furniture with ivory and coloured woods, and designs embodying conventional birds and flowers became of frequent use. A considerable amount of skill was employed in adopting this new art, which necessitated the careful laying of veneer. In comparison with the ordinary Dutch cabinet-work, this derivative English furniture exhibits, in a measure, finished work of a high degree in regard to the exactitude of cabinet-work which surpassed the prototypes. The English craftsman was working in a new medium, and he apparently was exceptionally careful in handling its technique.

In the reign of William of Orange, as may be imagined, with his Dutch retinue and the Dutch influences at Court, the style received a great impetus and the country was flooded with Dutch art. This impress of the House of Nassau is left upon Hampton Court, with its canal, its avenues, and its formal gardens. What Charles II and his exiled cavaliers brought in spirit from The Hague, William brought in reality when he landed at Torbay in 1698.

It must be remembered that in 1685 and in the immediately succeeding years, owing to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV, fifty thousand Huguenot families fled from France to escape a horrible fate at the hands of their Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen. In vain the Archbishop of Canterbury directed the clergy not to dwell on the sufferings of the French Protestants, and in spite of James II, whose sympathies were with their persecutors, the sum of forty thousand pounds was collected in the English churches and handed over to the Chamber of London. This was a great sum in those days to be raised thus voluntarily. Three years afterwards James ignominiously fled to the Continent and a second Revolution ended the Stuart dynasty. Thousands of skilled workmen settled in London. At Spitalfields they erected silk-looms; they represented the best type of artist craftsmen, silversmiths, woodworkers, glass-blowers, cabinet-makers, designers, and other artistic industries. Their advent was an artistic asset to this country. The Duke of Buckingham ten years earlier had procured a number of expert glassworkers from Venice and had established the manufacture of glass and mirrors at Vauxhall.

What is Veneer?—The art of veneering is of ancient origin. It has a long record before it reaches what we now know as veneering. To make a rapid survey we must commence with the art of inlay. This art may be in metal upon metal, as in damascening; stone upon stone, as in pietra dura; porcelain, terra-cotta, enamel, or coloured glass, as in mosaic work; or wood upon wood, as in intarsia; which subsequently became marquetry. The inlays in all these techniques are cut into cubes, hexagons, triangles, or other forms, often of very minute size, to form broad designs, as in marble pavements, or surfaces of great area such as the dome of St. Mark's at Venice, the choicest home of mosaic work in the world. From these grandeurs to the Tunbridge ware trinket-boxes with their intricate patterns, or the nicely fitting lids of Scottish snuff-boxes, is a far cry, but they embody the same principle.

Veneering may therefore be comprehensively described as overlaying or inlaying one body with portions of another. A veneer may be plain, without inlay or marquetry, such as a plain panel of mahogany affixed or laid on to a body of oak or some other wood. But in practice it has been so much used as a groundwork for the art of inlay and marquetry that it is difficult to separate them.

There is a prevalent idea that veneer has a sinister meaning. The comparison has been made between solid and veneer, as though the former were true and the latter something false, parallel with the distinction Pope made—

Worth makes the man, the want of it, the fellow;

The rest is all but leather or prunello.

There is every reason why such a notion should be held as true. It is true of modern cabinet-work of the shoddy type, where pine is veneered with mahogany and walnut and passed off as solid. But the collector is dealing with a period when veneering was an art adopted for sound decorative and technical reasons and not solely for purposes of gain.

The old craftsman found it impossible to make cabinets and other pieces of furniture of rare wood, such as ebony, tulip-wood, rosewood, satinwood, and others. It was not always workable in such fashion; its weight was one factor against its employment in the solid. But in introducing panels and fronts of these richly decorative woods the cabinet-maker of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought colour into his work and employed the highest artistry. The sound construction of these old veneered cabinets was before the days of machinery; veneers or slices of the wood to be laid on were cut by hand, and were one-eighth of an inch thick, hence their stability. Nowadays sheets of veneer are saw-cut and knife-cut, and with modern machinery the former vary from twelve to fifteen to the inch, and the latter average about forty sheets to the inch, although sheets can be cut, incredible as it may seem, of the thinness of a cigarette paper.

What is Marquetry?—Marquetry is the inlaying of wood into wood. We have already seen that other inlays have their respective techniques and names. But there is the question as to the application of the old word "tarsia," which apparently in the early days included both wood and metal inlays. "Intarsia" is the term applied to that particular early type of marquetry which brought inlaying coloured woods to such perfection in two great schools, the Italian and the German. By means of woods, either of their natural colour or stained, woodworkers produced pictures in wood. Great Italian masters drew for the Italian school of artist craftsmen. Just as the dome of St. Mark's at Venice shows the successive styles of mosaic work executed during several centuries from Byzantine to Italian, so the choir stalls show the work of the cloistered intarsiatori at the cathedral at Siena, at the cathedral and at S. Maria Novella, Florence, at Perugia, at Lucca, at Pavia, at Genoa, and at Savona.

Small pieces of carefully selected wood were inserted into darker wood panels to produce fanciful devices or pictures, with perspective and even tone. This intricate art resembled that of the mosaic-worker, whose more ambitious works have taken from fifteen to twenty years to execute. Some of the tesseræ in this technique are hardly larger than a pin's head. Day by day they were patiently laid on the cement to form the design. Similarly in the old intarsia days the workers did not heed time. They selected their delicate little pieces of coloured wood and proceeded to lay their panels and stalls for posterity.

The German school of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attracted considerable attention, at Nuremberg, at Augsburg, at Dresden, and at Munich. In North Germany intarsia was principally employed on smaller articles, such as cabinets, chairs, coffers, although Lübeck and Danzig furnish fine examples in the panelling of the town-halls. In South Germany, in closer touch with Italian influence, the practice was more diverse; sideboards, doors, bedsteads, panelling, friezes, and even gables to châteaus, received this ornamentation.

Augsburg and Nuremberg developed an industry and exported their marquetry. This suggests the first attempt at duplication. Black on white and white on black, male and female as they are termed in the trade, or later, in France, Boulle and counter-Boulle, were exported. The slicing of design and the manipulation of the knife, and later the saw, came into operation to fret out the pattern. In its subsequent development marquetry left the inlaying, piece by piece, and as tools became more perfect easier methods were employed. Whether André Boulle, in his atelier under Louis XIV, invented the process or whether he got it from Germany through Holland is immaterial to the present argument. His brass and tortoiseshell marquetry set a fashion to all succeeding craftsmen. He has given his name to his particular style; though it has been "defamed by every charlatan and soiled with all ignoble use" and corrupted to "Buhl," but there is no reason why Boulle should not stand, although Webster's Dictionary knows him not.

Practically, nowadays marquetry is the cutting of thin sheets of wood which have been superimposed upon each other, and when taken apart, after the desired pattern has been cut away, fit into each other to produce the desired colour effect. For instance, a sheet of walnut, dark brown, placed over a sheet of sycamore, light yellow, has a pattern pasted on it in paper. The delicate fret-saw traces this pattern and cuts through both light and dark woods. The result is that the light-wood surface is left with a perforation ready to receive the piece cut from its fellow, the dark wood, and vice versa. That is just what the marquetry-worker does. He transposes the piece of sycamore to the walnut surface and fits it in, showing a yellow design on dark brown, and similarly the walnut piece, fitted in place or the sycamore ground, shows a brown design on a yellow surface. This is only a simple outline of the process, as more than two sheets are placed together. In its intricacies it represents one of the most delicate and highly skilled crafts in connection with cabinet-making. The adept at jig-saw puzzles may draw a seemly parallel between his pastime and the patient artistry of the artist-craftsman.

The Use of Veneer and Marquetry.—In its decoration and in its form the long-case or "grandfather" clock is as Dutch as the tiles of Haarlem. Derivative as is English art, the sharp line of a new introduction is rarely so clearly defined as in the instance of the late seventeenth-century long-case clock. As a long wooden case it was itself an innovation. Being new, it was never at any previous time English, and it started its history under Dutch auspices, as in similar manner the pendulum was introduced into England by Fromanteel. There is no mistaking its origin. It comes straight from the placid canals and waterways, the prim and well-ordered farmsteads, or the richly loaded burghers' houses of the Low Countries. It has become as thoroughly English as the Keppels and the Bentincks.

LONG-CASE CLOCK.
With fine marquetry decoration.
Maker, Jas. Leicester (Drury Lane). 1710.
Height, 8 ft. 2 in. Width, 1 ft. 7½ in. Depth, 10 in.
(By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq.)

LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, J. Windmills (London).
Date, about 1705.
Decorated in marquetry.

ENLARGEMENT OF DIAL.
Showing cherub's head with floriated design in spandrel and broken frieze. Marquetry in hood indicates coarser style than in rest of clock.

(By courtesy of H. Wingate, Esq., Rochester.)

In regard to clock-cases, it is mostly found that the veneer has been laid upon an oak body. Usually the main surface is of walnut, into which the design has been inlaid by the use of other woods of suitable colours. At first the marquetry was in reserves or panels, as though the worker were warily picking his way and timidly mastering the technique. At this period clock-cases were, on account of the small space to be inlaid, very fit subjects for experiment. Doubtless some of the more ambitious work of the early years of this half-century (1670-1720) was actually produced by Dutch and also by French workmen settled in this country, and doubtless the clock-cases were largely imported. In either instance this would account for the early adoption of small articles such as clock-cases, after which followed chairs and tables, and finally larger pieces of furniture such as bureaus, when the cabinet-maker was master of the new art of laying veneer and marquetry, or when the public taste had advanced sufficiently to induce him to embark on more elaborate work.

It is not easy to lay down any exact rules as to the priority of certain styles of marquetry. Many of them overlap in regard to date. It all depends on the point of view. Huguenot craftsmen or Dutch marquetry-workers could, and possibly did, make in London many such an example as the fine case with panels (illustrated p. [75]) containing the movement by James Leicester, in date 1710, or the other example, in date about 1690 (illustrated p. [237]), with the movement by Joseph Knibb, of Oxford, placed in the chapter on provincial makers as a glorious tribute to those great makers who worked outside the metropolis. In this earlier case of the Knibb clock it will be seen that there are only two panels, and they exhibit, in comparison with the James Leicester clock, a finer sense of proportion in relation to the surface to be decorated. It may not unreasonably be advanced, where the nicety of balance is well sustained, that the maker set out to make a clock-case with the dimensions fully before him as a marquetry-worker and not merely as a mechanical layer of imported panels. There is the suggestion in cut panels that they were not thought out in accord with the English clock-case, with its hole showing the pendulum.

Of exceptional interest is the fine clock by J. Windmills. The marquetry case of this clock has been untouched, and its condition, as shown by the illustration (p. [77]), helps to prove a point. It is clear that the panel of marquetry was not intended by the craftsman who laid it to have a hole to show the pendulum. The design shows the disturbance caused by this unexpected innovation. The enlarged hood shows the broken frieze, an accident frequently attending old examples. But the frame in hood around glass has been laid in marquetry by a coarser hand in an attempt to be in keeping with the panel of the door in case below. The somewhat clumsy joinery of the door frame, shown clearer in the enlargement, indicates the amalgamation of the English case-maker and the more finished marquetry-panel worker.

LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Henry Harper (Cornhill).
1690-95.
Height, 8 ft. 6 in. Width, 1 ft. 7½ in. Depth, 10 in.
(In the possession of Mr. John Girdwood, Edinburgh.)

Frequently cases offer curious obstacles to preconceived ideas. Take, for example, the fine case with the movement by Henry Harper of the period from 1690 to 1695 illustrated (p. [81]). As far as it is possible to determine, it would seem that this specimen of marquetry belongs to a later period, certainly more advanced than the panel period. With so fine a field of design to select from, no marquetry-worker would take this design from a Persian carpet at the beginning of the style. This case represents the highest Dutch feeling and technique as assimilated in this country, and the carved brackets have a distinctly Marot character. It stands as a superlative example of marquetry decoration.

It sometimes happens that a clockmaker, as the differences in sizes of many of these clocks are not great, found an earlier case ready to his hand, or a client desired a particular style of decoration, and he accordingly put his new clock of 1710 into a case twenty or thirty years earlier. Or it may be that some marquetry-worker reproduced the former style. Whichever may have happened we cannot say—these are the conundrums left as a heritage to the collector, who now comes two hundred years later.

The fine example of a clock by Martin, London (1710), illustrated (p. [85]), is well balanced, and typifies the marquetry in an early period. The turned pillar has not yet disappeared, and is reminiscent of the fine Tompion cases with turned pillars. It exhibits the transitional stage before marquetry entirely supplanted the older style. In this specimen the marquetry is under fine artistic control.

In what for convenience of expression we term the "all-over" period the marquetry-worker ran riot. Not only in colour, for he had to compete with the richly coloured lacquered cases, but in form. But he had as a craftsman learned the art of laying his imported marquetry sheets where he willed. He was not deterred from rounded surfaces, and the cramped pattern of the panel was discarded, to make way for the style where the pattern, like chintz or wall-paper, conveniently repeated itself.

There is no mistaking such an example, splendid though it is, as exemplifying this period illustrated (p. [87]), for the quieter and more reticent style of panel-work with design in due subjection.

The student will desire to take cognizance of country-made marquetry cases. Marquetry was practised in England before this outburst of colour and form on the clock-case. Occasionally settles and buffets—very occasionally—had stringing in a thin pattern of black and white intarsia work. Provincial makers are therefore a delight as well as a confoundment to the collector. A cabinet-maker in Devonshire or a would-be marquetry-worker in Cumberland may, between his intervals of making the coffins for his deceased neighbours or turning their wagon shafts, essay to try his hand at imitating the squire's clock-case of fifty years' previous date. He usually puts a label to his handiwork which renders it easily recognizable. There is no style réfugié about his craftsmanship. His design is crudely "chopped in," that is, the solid wood has been cut out to receive the pieces of the design, usually, as found now, very badly glued, and severely handled by time. This is interesting as showing 'prentice work—that is, 'prentice work coming many years after the finished art had been established in this country. It is remarkable that no such apprentice work appears in London-made examples. The conclusion to which one must come is that there was no such apprenticeship. Foreign refugees made the clock-cases or they were imported from Holland.

LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Martin (London). 1710.
Finely decorated in marquetry, with turned pillars in hood. Showing transitional period.
(In the possession of Mr. John Girdwood, Edinburgh.)

LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Decorated in marquetry in the "all-over" style.
(By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons.)

No Common Origin of Design.—All art is derivative. It is not a crime for the craftsman to assimilate the best of all the great artists who have preceded him. This was the insanity of L'Art Nouveau. It wanted to commence again at elementary principles and to use poor forms that had long been discarded by great artificers. It wished us deliberately to ignore the past. An anvil has arrived by a process of evolution through long centuries of metal-workers, since man first smelted ore and fashioned metal, to its present form. It would be idle to equip the blacksmith with a square anvil.

From China to Japan, from India to Armenia, from Bagdad to Cairo, from Alexandria to Venice, from Canton to Goa and thence to Lisbon, backwards and forwards across the world's trade routes art impulses have throbbed to the tune of the monsoons. Pulsating with life, they carried, and still carry, Eastern ideas to the West, and Western inventions to the East. Behind modernity and man's latest devices somnolently lies the great dead past—China and the Far East, Persia and Babylon, Egypt and Greece and Rome. Aztec gods and Ashanti gold ornaments, Peruvian Inca clay vessels and Malayan idols, surprise and bewilder the ethnologist with the similarity of rudimentary forms or with the marvellously pure ornament that comes out of the so-conceived dark corners of the earth to suggest older civilizations as artistic as those of the modern world.

Le Style Réfugié.—The history of art is not hidden. Holbein and Hollar and Vandyck, Lely and Kneller worked in this country. The number of foreign artists and artist-craftsmen working in this country as acclimatized or as "naturalized" was stupendous. The beautiful swags and delicately carved woodwork embellishing so many English houses and proudly held as heirlooms are by a Dutchman's hand—Grinling Gibbons. The list could be extended. It is natural that the gold of England should have a hypnotic attraction to artistic temperaments. It is the law of supply and demand. Like bananas and pineapples, oranges and dates, foreign talent comes to a great emporium.

The style réfugié was something definite. It was a term employed in Holland just at the time when a similar immigration was occurring in this country. The French Protestant refugees fleeing from the insane fury of Roman Catholic bigots naturally fled to Protestant countries—to England, to Holland, and to Germany. It is admitted on the Continent that these highly skilled artist craftsmen had an influence on the art of the country of their adoption. It is acknowledged as le style réfugié. In England, writers on furniture have half-heartedly alluded to this influence, but it was very real. Daniel Marot, a descendant from an eminent family of French artists, a pupil of Lepautre, formerly at the Gobelins factory, and one of the creators of the Louis Quatorze style, took refuge in Holland, where William of Orange appointed him as Minister of Works. From The Hague he followed his patron to England at the "Glorious Revolution." It was his genius in design that made our William and Mary and Queen Anne styles. At Hampton Court his personality predominates. Sir Christopher Wren occupied himself with the architecture, but the decorations are by Daniel Marot. Marot died in 1718. He stands in the forefront of the exponents of le style réfugié, and behind him are hundreds of his compatriots. It is idle to ignore this influence.

Chippendale owed more than most people imagine to Marot. Le style chinois is to be found, so to speak, in embryo, in Marot's design books, and suggestions of it appear in some of his executed work.

The un-English marquetry became acclimatized, and later, as we shall show, the equally un-English lac became a fashion.

Derivative Nature of Marquetry Clock-cases.—The laying of marquetry as a craft is one thing, the conception of marquetry as a creative art is another. We may admire the dexterity of the inlay but deplore the design. At the Mortlake tapestry works Vandyck and Rubens made drawings for the craftsmen. In England, whenever the craftsman has been allied with the artist he has produced great results; whenever he has run alone he has rapidly run downhill. Josiah Wedgwood had on the one side Bentley the classical scholar, on the other Flaxman the artist and modeller with a perfect continental training. Chippendale, great craftsman that he was, would have been better advised to prune his Chinese taste and discard his worthless Gothic style. An artistic brain behind him would have saved him from such atrocities. Sheraton, more the artist than the craftsman, made no such blunders.

Evidently the making of clock-cases became an industry. Personally we incline to the belief that seventy-five per cent. of them were of foreign manufacture, either in Holland and imported here, or made by Dutch immigrants or French refugees in this country. The derivative nature of their design tells its own story. It has nothing English about it. Take the early geometric star pattern or the early coloured birds and flowers, what else are they but Dutch? Is there anything in English art like them? The conclusion to which one must arrive is that the marquetry clock-case panel is Dutch or Anglo-Dutch. The derivative character runs through the whole gamut from the reticent and well-balanced panel period to the "all over" phase, when every inch was covered with marquetry, to the arabesque and intricate mosaic work reminiscent of Persia, and finally to the decadent period when Eastern carpets found themselves reproduced in marquetry on the clock-case.

WILLIAM AND MARY CHEST OF DRAWERS.
On original stand. Decorated in marquetry. Side showing panel in common use by cabinet-makers and clock-case makers.
(By courtesy of Messrs. Hampton & Son.)

CHEST OF DRAWERS DECORATED IN MARQUETRY.
Side showing panel in common use by cabinet-makers and clock-case makers.
(By courtesy of Messrs. A. B. Daniell & Sons.)

When the hood of the clock-case became arched and the dial correspondingly had a lunette, the decorative marquetry panel in the case below followed the same form. It is possible, indeed very probable, that many such shaped panels were imported and were especially intended to meet the demand for use on clock-cases. It is always possible to a trained eye to see whether a panel has been made to fit the place in which one finds it. Is it part of a sanely conceived decorative scheme, or was it used because it happened to be handy as part of a cabinet-maker's stock-in-trade? We illustrate two examples of marquetry chests of drawers of the William and Mary period which offer many interesting features. In regard to the example with the oval panels (illustrated p. [93]), the side of the piece exhibits a panel that is incongruous where it is. It is a clock-case panel. Similarly in the "all-over" marquetry chest of drawers of the same period (illustrated p. [95]), the panel at the side is undoubtedly a clock-case panel. To examine both these chests of drawers in detail is to discover that the former shows that the panels of the drawers were carefully thought out before execution. The metal drop-handles in the centre were each intended to be there. They were in the cabinet-maker's mind when he made his design and laid his marquetry. He has accommodated his pattern to receive these handles. In the other example it is seen that no such care was taken. The escutcheon of the locks covers a portion of the marquetry. The cabinet-maker in London had his Dutch-imported panels ready to hand and he used them as he found them.

If some collector or expert were to come along and determine that all the green and purple and flecked glass of the Early Victorian period, bottles with long necks and gilded stoppers, in English leather cases, vases of inimitable colour but execrable form, were typically English as representing early nineteenth century glass, we should put his theories aside as nonsense. Partly because we happen to know what Bohemia was exporting and partly because we know what the English glassworkers were doing in the same period. But in regard to 1650 to 1700 it is less easy to determine whether a wonderful school of expert marquetry-workers existed in London as a secret industry. One must assume that they had quietly assimilated all the technique of the Dutch craftsmen, and descended on the town, just at the right moment, with a new art, quite un-English, just at that moment when Dutch fashions were in the ascendant and when Mary, the consort of William of Orange, was employing Marot, the late Surveyor of The Hague, to convert Hampton Court from a Tudor into an Anglo-Orange palace.

On an examination of delft earthenware of the period and Dutch decorative art in general, it is fairly obvious that the art impulses coincide with the various phases of ornament as found on the marquetry panel, whether they were the floriated designs of Italy with the vase and the symmetrical flowers in conventional form, further conventionalized by the Dutch, who clung to tulips and carnations, or the arabesque designs derived from the Dutch traffic with the East Indies, the pseudo-Persian sherbet tray as a panel, the prayer rug as a full design. With his black delft to imitate lacquered work of Japan and his blue delft to imitate the Kang-he Chinese porcelain, the Dutchman proved himself a superlative translator. The Dutch East India Company, till it was supplanted, was the conduit-pipe through which the arts of the East were allowed to pass into Europe.

In another portion of this volume we show how apparently obscure ornament has a long lineage, and that craftsmen in minor details were producing something of which possibly they knew not the origin nor the significance; but it behoves the intelligent collector, who, after all, is in possession of more facts, spread over a wider area, to arrive at sane conclusions in regard to workers who wrought better than they thought.

The Wall-paper Period.—It was a sad time when the idea originated to make wall-paper simulate marble or tapestry or leather, or anything else. Wall-hangings made of paper by the Chinese came into England in the early seventeenth century. But European wall-paper is a modern abomination. Chintz has a better excuse to imitate satin. "Callicoes" were tabooed at first, but they had and have a legitimate place. Wall-paper is an affectation which cannot be defended. It always pretends to be what it is not. It is really wonderful that amateurs did not paste it over clock-cases. Perhaps they did, and other persons, wiser in their generation, removed it.

But if wall-paper of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was not affixed to the clock-case, it was there in spirit, as it was on strident bureaus and other equally offensive articles of the period. The "all-over" style exhibits marquetry run mad. Artisans could apply the thin veneer, ten sheets to the inch, like paper, and they did. They had borders as common as modern factory-made imitation lace at a few pence per yard, and they laid them beside the pilasters and around the already well covered case. There was no square inch that could be said to be free from the attentions of the gluer of marquetry sheets. He began to dominate decoration till happily he was extinguished.

The Incongruities of Marquetry.—To those who have handled a good many examples of marquetry furniture in which panelling is predominant, such as clock-cases, there is one feature which always strikes the practised eye. The question arises, How did the marquetry panel come there? It is another way of expressing the view that the proportion is radically wrong. A glance at a poor panel of a clock-case, or a faked panel, or a stupidly wrought panel, is enough. To the collector of old books nothing is more annoying than to find that the binder with all his fine tooling has trimmed off the margins of the printed matter and the illustrations. It is an edition with the space expurgated. It is the binder versus the printer, and similarly in the clock-case it is too often the cabinet-maker versus the designer of the marquetry panel. This is the sentiment one has on looking at many of the marquetry clock-cases. The persons who received them from Holland did not always know how to use them correctly. They either cut off their edges or left so little space as to convey the idea of a curtailed edition of the original. In the case of the panelled period, when there were three panels, two of them had more often than not to be cut off in the middle to make room for the circular aperture in the door showing the swinging pendulum. When the case-maker received his panels according to order from the Continent, one would have thought he would have done away with the hole in the case. But perhaps the clockmaker insisted otherwise. At any rate, it is a point showing the absence of intimate relationship between clockmaker and case-maker. Holland seems to be the answer, in spite of all experts to the contrary.

On the "all-over" marquetry clock-cases there is a decided inclination to follow the designs found on contemporary delft ware. As to repetition, however well joined they are, the glue and the wax cannot hide the poverty of design. Twice or thrice in one case are patterns repeated. It is the wall-paper artist at work in a smaller area. In this connection one recalls the decadence of the wood-engravers, where three or four artists worked on portions of one picture cut into sections and screwed together as one block. The old journals, the Illustrated London News, and the Graphic and others of the early 'eighties, tell of this decadence. The thin white lines, as long as ink and paper last, record this subterfuge. It was the last note of wood-engraving. Similarly, in marquetry, when we find the almost invisible lines denoting several hands, or the piecing together of the same design cunningly to deceive the persons at the period, we at a later stage read this as the note determining the end, and the end soon came.

[CHAPTER IV]

THE LONG-CASE CLOCK—THE PERIOD OF LACQUER

What is lac?—Its early introduction into this country—"The Chinese taste"—Colour versus form—Peculiarities of the lacquered clock-case—The English school—English amateur imitators—Painted furniture not lacquered work—The inn clock.

Lacquered work is the most un-English style of decoration that has ever been employed by the cabinet-maker in the embellishment of his furniture. It came from the East and was introduced into this country about the same period as tea-drinking. At first tea was drunk by fashionable folk from cups without handles, now it is the national beverage. Lac is a natural product of China, the sap of a tree in appearance resembling our ash-tree. It is not an artificial compound of resin and oils, worked down by turpentine. This natural gum is refined and coloured red, black, golden yellow, green, or grey. The surface of the wood is carefully prepared, and a ground is laid on by degrees, care being taken that each is of the right temperature and perfectly hard and dry before any layer is applied. Never less than three and sometimes as many as eighteen thin layers are thus applied to the surface of the wood before the actual decoration of this ground by the artist commences. In regard to the use of lac in this country, practical experts have questioned as to whether it is possible in a climate like this to effect the clean drying so necessary to attain perfection. London and other cities, on account of their dust-charged atmosphere, are unsuited for lacquer work.

The artist draws his design of landscape or figures or birds or flowers, filling his details with gold or silver and superimposed colours built up with mastic, of those parts which are intended to be in slight relief.

The Japanese brought the art of lacquer to the highest perfection. To those readers who desire to see the art of lacquer shown in its various stages, there is in the Botanical Museum at Kew Gardens a collection of specimens in various stages, including sections of the lacquer-tree, from which the lac exudes, and of various coloured lacs, and examples illustrating no less than fifty different methods of lacquering sword-sheaths.

An examination of lacquer work is to be found in Chinese Art, vol. i, by Dr. Stephen W. Bushell, formerly physician to His Majesty's Legation at Peking. In the print-room of the Imperial Library at Paris is an album with drawings of the processes and explanatory notes.

The Lacquer Industry in Japan forms a Report of His Majesty's Acting-Consul at Hakodate (Mr. J. J. Quin), printed as a Parliamentary Paper in 1882.

Its Early Introduction into this Country.—At first the Portuguese had the monopoly of trade with the Far East. When Philip of Spain annexed Portugal in 1598, he sought to shut out the Dutch traders from participation in this trade. By this act he laid the foundation of the Dutch East India Company. It was only when Cornelius Houtman procured some Portuguese charts that the Dutch navigators first rounded the Cape en route for India and China and Japan. The great Dutch East India Company was established in 1602.

Porcelain and lacquered cabinets and boxes were thus at an early date distributed as rare articles of curious art at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Drake and Raleigh had captured Spanish galleons with such treasure, and the Portuguese possession of Goa in India had brought the wealth of the Far East to Western Europe. Evelyn tells us in his Diary, in 1681, of the richness of the apartments of the Duchess of Portsmouth at Whitehall. "The very furniture of the chimney was massy silver. The sideboards were piled with richly wrought plate. In the niches stood cabinets, the masterpieces of Japanese art." The dowry of Queen Catherine of Braganza did not come up to the expectations of the spendthrift Charles, although she came loaded with "japanned" boxes and rare artistic treasures from the East. Memoirs of this time furnish abundant proof that lacquered work was, in pieces of imported furniture, known in this country. But it is little likely that anything of that nature was manufactured here at that date. As a nation we had not developed on those lines; it is a fact worth remembering that as late as the reign of Charles II the greater part of the iron used in this country was imported from abroad.

"The Chinese Taste."—This is a term which finds itself repeated like a parrot-cry from the late years of the seventeenth century. The vogue reached its height in 1750 as a fashion for the wealthy and a pastime for the dilettanti, and disturbed the steady growth of national spirit in art. There was a Chinese Festival at Drury Lane Theatre in 1755.

Chippendale snatched his fretwork in his brackets and the angles of his chairs from the Chinese worker in ebony. He erected pagoda-like structures on his cabinets. The Bow china factory termed itself "New Canton," Worcester copied Chinese models, Bristol carried on the story. Staffordshire with her earthenware brought out the "willow-pattern," and a hundred other designs were acclimatized as reflections of the blue and white Canton porcelain.

"Taste is at present the darling idol of the polite world and the world of letters, and, indeed, seems to be considered as the quintessence of almost all the arts and sciences. The fine ladies and gentlemen dress with taste, the architects, whether Gothic or Chinese, build with taste." So writes the essayist in the Connoisseur journal in 1756, and he continues ironically, "Whoever makes a pagoda of his parlour fits up his house entirely in taste."

This "Chinese taste" had seized France and Holland. The French artist-craftsmen readily saw that the great influx of Chinese and Japanese furniture would stifle their national artistic impulses. Louis Quatorze had to issue a decree at the end of the seventeenth century to prohibit the import of Oriental wares. The craze reached England later and developed later. But early in the eighteenth century the cabinet-makers of London petitioned Parliament against the importation of manufactured articles from the East Indies to this country. But nothing much seems to have come of their protest. The East India Company had become too powerful to brook interference with its trade by interested artisans. Thousands of lac panels were brought over in the company's ships, even in spite of the deep-rooted belief that lacquer work had at that time become an English art. It is to be presumed that some of the contentions of the old European lacquer-workers may be said to be parallel with the assertions of old potters who asseverated that they had discovered the true porcelain of China. In 1709 Böttger, at Meissen, had for the first time succeeded in producing white hard, paste porcelain, not in imitation of the Chinese, but actually a reproduction of the Oriental technique. But the secret was well kept, and Böttger and his workmen were imprisoned in a fortress. Since Father Du Halde, the Jesuit, had published in Paris in 1725 his Description de l'Empire de la Chine, other European potters had endeavoured to find the natural earths of the Chinese, kaolin and petuntse. When William Cookworthy, the chemist and potter of Plymouth, wrote of his discovery of the china clays, Josiah Wedgwood journeyed to Cornwall on a wild-goose chase.

It may be imagined, with data such as these to guide us—first, the growing intensity of the "Chinese taste"; second, the demand for furniture and porcelain on the part of the wealthy classes—that as a consequence an attempt was made to supply the demand.

There were various sources of supply for lacquered furniture, especially lacquered clock-cases. There was the Dutch market, from which was obtained, as in the case of marquetry, panels of lacquered work. At first, without doubt, these came from the East through Holland. The next stage was the Dutch lacquered panel actually produced in Holland. Later there was again the Oriental panel coming straight from the East through our own East India Company. Contemporaneously with these importations, which served as models, there was the lacquered work produced in this country. We shall later attempt to differentiate between these styles.

Colour versus Form.—In various epochs the struggle has gone on in the applied arts in regard to the use and abuse of colour in decoration as an adjunct. In furniture the pendulum has swung to and fro. Colour follows form in the process of evolution. In England there is the oak period and the walnut period, where the beauty is solely dependent upon form. The conception of the cabinet-maker has usually been confined to form, eschewing colour, or to colour more or less ignoring the beauty of form, or as a compromise, when form has been subservient to colour. When form and colour are in exact harmony the highest ideals are reached in furniture. The Chinese have reached these ideals. The Italian school of the fifteenth century in the marriage coffer, where painting or coloured intarsia is of parallel beauty with the rich carving, achieved like success. With similar judgment, in holding the balance evenly between form and colour, André Charles Boulle conceived his wonderful work in tortoiseshell and brass and ebony and silver, forming a brilliant marquetry of colour, the colour effect being further heightened with a reddish-brown and sometimes a bluish-green ground beneath the semi-transparent tortoiseshell. Riesener and David Roentgen, in equally masterful technique, produced marquetry of tulip-wood, holly, rosewood, purple wood, and laburnum. With the style embodying the enrichment of the plain surface with colour came the use, and later the abuse, of lacquered panels.

A Dutch cabinet-maker, Huygens, had won renown by reproducing remarkable imitations of the Japanese lacquered panel. In Holland, Chinese prototypes had served as models for delft ware. The Dutch potter had simulated the appearance of blue and white Chinese porcelain, but his results were obtained by a white enamel covering a brown body. Dutch lacquer work is similarly imitative of the results rather than a duplication of the Oriental processes. Chintzes and printed "callicoes" equally are surprising efforts at simulation, if not dissimulation.

As a supreme effort of the successful attempt of the European to reproduce the wonderful limpid transparency of the old Chinese and Japanese work, the secret of Sieur Simon Etienne Martin, a French carriage painter, stands supreme. His varnish, called after him Vernis-Martin, has become the term, as in the case of Boulle, for a certain class of technique. In 1744 he obtained the monopoly in France for the manufacture of lacquered work in the Oriental style. He obtained the ground of wavy golden network, such as in rare Japanese panels, and on this Boucher and other artists painted Arcadian subjects.

In England it cannot be said that these great foreign styles have been emulated in the grand manner or even attempted. When colour came to England it came straight from Holland, and le style réfugié is responsible for the intermingling of the Dutch and French styles, though the former were at first greatly predominant. The important bureaus and splendid lacquered cabinets produced in the period when colour was employed so lavishly as to disregard form, are attributable, not for the least part of their excellent technique in the skilful employment of lacquer, to the great number of French and other foreign workmen who had settled in this country.

Peculiarities of the Lacquered Clock-case.—The use of the lacquered panel in the long case of the clock cannot be said to have a definite period of its own. We cannot mark an exact date when marquetry panels or marquetry "all-over" cases were no longer the vogue, and when lacquered cases succeeded them. The two styles were comparatively contemporaneous. Marquetry cases, as we have seen, are as early as 1680, and they continued till about 1725, and later in the provinces. The lacquered case may be said to have run its day from about 1700 to 1755. On the whole they seemed to have had a longer vogue, mainly on account of the prevalence of the "Chinese taste," which demanded colour. Lacquered decoration jumped the experimental stage of reserves or panels that apparently were not quite in exact proportions to the case, but had to be fitted in and sometimes trimmed. It came at a juncture when this difficulty had been mastered. Accordingly, we find the whole of the lacquered case has been regarded as a rectangular surface to be decorated, and we have not met with any instance of more than one lacquered panel being employed on the case. The marquetry case offered other features which indicated the struggle of colour for supremacy. In the early marquetry specimens the turned walnut pillars of the hood belong to an earlier style. They indicate that that form had not been completely ousted. The marquetry worker in the end overcame this and drove these pillars out. In the lacquered case no such struggle is visible. The case is entirely a scheme in colour. It is red, or green, it is black and gold, but the design is never so strong as to tempt one to examine its form. It is simply decorative, but much in the manner that, in textile art, tapestry is pleasing, not challenging a critical examination of form, but suggesting a somnolent restfulness.

Touches of incongruity appear in later examples of the lacquered clock-case when the arched hood came into fashion and the panel followed suit. It is a shape unsuited to an Oriental design. Such a Western architectural style used in combination with so Eastern a technique as lacquered work is like putting a Corinthian pillar on a Japanese bronze.

The lacquered cases illustrated in this chapter indicate the style. The example with the movement by Joseph Dudds (1766-82), (illustrated p. [115]), shows the early attempt to simulate the Eastern style. It is poor and thin, and has not stood the ravages of time and a damp climate.

The specimen (illustrated p. [117]), with the movement by Kenneth Maclellan (1760-80), is of more grandiose character. The panelled door was probably an importation, and the other decorations in lacquer done in this country.

Among the Scottish clocks, the Patrick Gordon example (1705-15), (illustrated p. [263]), proves this usage of imported Oriental panel with added decoration in as near a style as could be done on the spot. In this example the remainder of the so-called lacquered decoration is stencilled.

LONG-CASE CLOCK WITH LACQUER DECORATION.
Brass dial with circular medallion with maker's name, "Joseph Dudds, London" (1766-82).

LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Maker, Kenneth Maclennan (London).
Finely decorated in green lacquer.
Date, 1760-80.
Height, 8 ft. Width, 1 ft. 8 in. Depth, 10 in.
(By courtesy of Percy Webster, Esq.)

The English School.—Dutch lacquered work was as prevalent between 1680 and 1725 as was Dutch marquetry. The rivalry between "John Company" and the Dutch traders was one factor that has to be considered. Lacquered work was coming straight from the East to Amsterdam and to English ports. What was not absorbed by the Dutch burghers came to England. Apart from this competitive Oriental trade, there was the lacquered work actually made in Holland. In examining the state of that country at this time one meets with a surprise. It was a land teeming with colour. Dutch painters have taught us to think otherwise. The Rijks Museum exhibits the prevalent styles of the seventeenth century. Here we find leather decorations derivative from Spain in rich gilding, Louis Quatorze boudoirs with classic gods and goddesses. The "Chinese Boudoir" from the palace of the Stadtholder at Leeuwarden shows the intense love of colour that had conquered Holland in the late seventeenth century. Here we find the Chinese prototypes in porcelain which provided the potters at Delft with problems to solve, and lacquered work which suggested patient imitation by Dutch cabinet-makers, but the colour and advanced technique of such Oriental originals must have confounded the old craftsmen.

The potter simulated the porcelain with his enamelled earthenware, the cabinet-maker produced lacquered work which passed muster in Holland and England. Take the house of the rich burgher. The table was covered with an Eastern rug, called a "table carpet." The linen cupboards so beloved by the Dutch were surmounted by Chinese and Japanese porcelain. Often a Japanese lac cabinet gave another touch of colour to the interior. Rich damask curtains, Spanish leather hangings, Oriental rugs, finely inlaid cabinets of ebony and silver, and a glowing array of copper and brass, filled the heart of the Dutch vrouw with pride. Such rooms were regarded as a "holy of holies," and the family had their meals in the kitchen or living room and were warned off the show room. The seventeenth-century Dutchwoman, according to all accounts, seems to have been a shrew. But enough is extant to prove that Holland was artistically, in regard to the home-life of Stadtholder and burgher, resplendent with colour, in spite of the low tones of the canvases of Dutch painters.

In England, too, the love of colour was becoming predominant. Fifty thousand Huguenot families, with their Latin blood and love of colour, scattered in the Protestant countries had no inconsiderable influence. Spitalfields silk is as English as the dark and tortuous lanes from which it emanates. But every weaver had a French name, and although the industry has come to an end, tomorrow, if the demand arose, the descendants of these French Huguenots would again stand at the looms to produce English silk.

The sudden outburst of colour in the now rarely prized English lacquered cabinets and bureaus must be attributed to the foreign workmen in our midst at the close of the seventeenth century. It is English perforce, because it was made in England. The followers of Huygens the Dutchman and the disciples of Martin the Frenchman were capable of producing something new and something surprising in English cabinet work. The foreign quarters of London have always been the centre of art industry. Armenians sit on the roofs of fashionable West End emporiums and restore carpets and rugs. Polish and Russian furriers travel by the Tube from Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, from the Commercial Road and Shoreditch to Regent Street and Bond Street with their handiwork. What is now, was two hundred and fifty years ago. Alien craftsmen, more skilled than the English workmen, worked for less wages and produced better work.

The English style, therefore, of the late seventeenth century in lacquered work was as English as the work of Daniel Marot the Frenchman and of Grinling Gibbons the Dutch woodcarver at Hampton Court.

The English style is praised as something fine and original as a European replica of the Oriental. So it is. It is the French grafted on to the Dutch and acclimatized here. It holds the same place in lacquered work as the Dutch delft ware does in ceramics. It is a splendid imitation of a technique not grasped by the imitator. Lovers of lacquered rarities and collectors of the so-called English style, so rare and so much extolled, can take it to heart that it is really English—as English as the canvases of Vandyck or the painted panels of pergolesi.

English Amateur Imitators.—There are records enough to show that the art of lacquer had appealed to the amateur on account of its apparent simplicity. It is ludicrous to read of the attempts of seventeenth-century teachers of the art of "japanning" to young ladies. The seventeenth-century "miss," according to old memoirs, left her Stuart stump needlework, with its quaint costume and crude figures, to simulate the subtle art of the Chinese or Japanese lacquer-worker. At that time the greatest coach-panel painter could not have approached the finesse of the lacquered work coming from the East. In spite of Stalker and Parker in 1688, with their treatise how to produce lacquered "japanning" in the Oriental style—a guide for amateurs and the standard work for all the academies that taught this new accomplishment—we cannot believe much of this amateur work found its way on clock-cases, which in point of time heralded the oncoming burst of colour. It is incredible that all of a sudden, following the clock-case and the chair-back, fine red and green and black and gold lac decoration, as exhibited by rich cabinets and gorgeous bureaus scintillating with colour, could have succeeded the stump-work amateurs. Stalker and company must go by the board as caterers for a very amateur taste. Their book possibly never reached the trade, or if it did, it could have had very little influence upon adept refugees practising a subtle art.

Painted Furniture not Lacquered Work.—Whatever may be determined as to the merits of Vernis-Martin or of the creations of Huygens the Dutchman in regard to comparison with Chinese and Japanese prototypes, it is certain that English amateur work, which is often dull gold design on a black ground, is not only an echo but a feeble echo of the original. They are splendid examples of dulness. Pepys complains that women wore feathers in his day. The feminine instinct is difficult to reckon with. Some years ago very up-to-date young wives "aspinalled" everything pea-green or peacock-blue. They did a lot of damage. Similarly, in the seventeenth century, when the boudoir escaped from needlework into lacquer, much otherwise harmless furniture must have been spoilt. Hundreds of fine pieces of furniture were brought up to date by the simple process of painting them and simulating the Chinese lacquered work. In the Early Victorian age of graining, sapient workmen painted solid oak panels and grained them to resemble the oak that they had painted. Folly is not the monopoly of any age. It is eternal. To-day the framer, if he is not watched and carefully instructed, glues a fine engraving to a sheet of cardboard and rubs a wet cloth over the surface of the print, destroying its beauty for ever with his clod-like smudge. Fools are ever present to confound the conservation of art treasures.

Painting a surface, however Oriental it may be in design, is not lacquer work. Half the so-called lacquered work is merely painting with a coat of varnish put on it. When Sheraton and his school brought French painted panels into fashion in this country, they brought a true art. But it was not lacquer. Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, and Pergolesi, who used their brushes on cabinet work, and Zoffany, who did not disdain to paint clock-cases for Rimbault, brought a new style to this country. It was the age of colour-prints in the French taste; the Wards, the George Morlands, and the Bartolozzis demanded colour as a suitable environment. Satinwood and coloured marquetry and the painted panel accordingly found a place at this moment.

The amateur attempts of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, up to the furore of the "Chinese taste" in 1750, must be disregarded as something outside the field of the collector—that is, if he is desirous of selecting lacquered work of excellent character. As a phase of fashionable caprice it is no doubt interesting, but it is to be hoped that most of these amateur efforts have succumbed to the influence of time and have been destroyed. They represent nothing in particular except a sham imitation of a great art, as stupidly offensive as was Strawberry Hill, the Gothic toy of Horace Walpole.

The Inn Clock.—We interpolate here a short outline of a class of clocks which appeals to collectors. In America they are termed "banjo clocks." A good deal has been written about them, connecting them with Pitt's tax on clocks and watches in 1797 of five shillings on each clock per annum, which Act was repealed in the next year. It is supposed that these clocks suddenly came into being when private clocks were taxed, and were used in inns. Owing to such a deep-seated belief they are always known throughout the country as "Act of Parliament" clocks. But they were used earlier than the Act of 1797, and were probably ordinary inn clocks in common use about that time. They were wall clocks varnished with black lacquer, mostly plain, but sometimes decorated in gold. Often the figures were in white and they had no protective glass.