Clocks

Benefiting from the continuing fashion for late 19th century novelty mantel clocks, a gilt-brass and steel example by Guilmet made the running at Peter Wilson (22% buyer’s premium) of Nantwich.

Clock produced by Englishman influential in French horology impresses in Norfolk auction.

Pieces from the late 19th century, a vibrant but occasionally derided moment in the history of the decorative arts, provided many of the highlights to Sworders’ summer Fine Interiors sale in Stansted Montfitchet.

The 52-lot auction of furniture, paintings and works of art collected by members of the Rothschild family was among the most animated during a packed week of London showpiece sales.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

A clock made for King William and Queen Mary by Thomas Tompion (1639-1713) was hammered down for £1.6m atThe Clive Collection of Exceptional Clockssale on June 19 at Bonhams.

More of a curiosity than a clock but a decorator’s dream, a life-size caricature of a smiling Chinese man clutching a willow-pattern plate with gilt dragon hands emerged in the Ayr rooms of Thomas R Callan (17.5% buyer’s premium).

Golden Age collaboration between two London clockmakers leads a look at the market including hammer highlights, auction previews and dealer news.

Eardley Norton, who is listed at 49 St John’s Street, Clerkenwell between 1762- 94, enjoyed a reputation as a skilled mechanic and the maker of complex timepieces, sometimes with musical and astronomical movements.

The series of Victorian carriage clocks by James McCabe – the son of a Belfast clockmaker of the same name who came to London in the 1770s and worked at the Royal Exchange from 1804 – are typically beautifully made with exemplary twin fusee striking movements.

By the 1980s, Thomas Mercer of St Albans had made almost a third of all chronometers in history – including that used by Ernest Shackleton to navigate his men to Elephant Island and eventual rescue during the Trans-Arctic Expedition of 1914.

Kensington Church Street clock dealer Howard Walwyn will offer this previously unknown Thomas Tompion walnut and mulberry longcase at the Masterpiece fair in London.

A rare regulator bracket clock signed by Thomas Cole was among a fine selection of English 18th and 19th century horology offered by Hutchinson-Scott (20% buyer’s premium) in Skipton, North Yorkshire, on May 23.

Remarkably, of the approximately 110 clockmakers recorded working in Lewes from the mid-17th to the early 19th centuries, as many as 10 were operating almost side-by-side at this town on the River Ouse in the late 18th century.

The complex precision electromechanical pendulum clocks made by William Hamilton-Shortt, engineer for the London & South Western Railway, and Frank Hope Jones, horologist of the Synchronome Company, were the most accurate pendulum clocks ever commercially produced.

A mahogany longcase clock by Thomas Mudge (1715-94) is priced at £45,000 from Cheltenham dealer Tobias Birch.

Undoubtedly the most evocative account of the workshop of the celebrated clockmaker Joseph Knibb comes from a letter written by the Restoration-era politician Richard Legh (1635-87) of Lyme Hall in Cheshire to his young wife, Elizabeth.

As the vast majority of Georgian clockmakers signed their work, most regional brass-dial longcase clocks have a great sense of place.

These two mahogany library mantel timepieces – for sale at Dreweatts of Donnington Priory in the autumn – were supplied to HM Government by Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy in the early days of Victoria’s reign.