John Fromanteel - Monumental architectural ebony night mantle clock with painted dial of survey party and a tic-tac escapement.
Join Dr John C Taylor OBE from the Clocktime digital museum as he discusses the design of John Fromanteel’s Monumental Architectural Night Clock, circa 1667.
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This appears to be the only night spring clock made in the Fromanteel workshop by Fromanteel's son, John Fromanteel, made in about 1662. And it's quite a piece, isn't it? Really makes a statement. Imagine having that in your bedroom. On the dial, we've got this wonderful painting on copper of a survey party. The plane table here, the armillary sphere, the backstaff, the three in the survey party working away, surveying the landscape. Still left in the centre of the dial is a little square which comes through to turn the clock to the correct time if it's stopped and of course that was the arbor that was used in the Victorian times to put a little clock face on there and pretend these were the signs of the zodiac. So, the rotating hour shows the minute, so that it's 15 minutes 30 minutes 45 and so it's just 14 minutes past 7 o'clock in the morning. It's a wonderful extravagant clock with three columns and on the bases here coming up are repoussé ornaments of flowers and vines all intertwined. The repoussé work is made with thin brass and it's very carefully hammered and made into these wonderful designs and then it's pierced and these have then been gilded, fire gilded with mercury, the mercury is boiled off and you end up with the gilding. The Corinthian capitals, the bases, the fret of the frieze here, all wonderful over-the-top ornamentation to create this wonderful piece. The Victorian book by Britten suggests that there might have been a moon phase mounted in the aperture up here. I think that's a bit too in congruous to believe. Even though this is a black clock, the ebony case in the tradition of the Puritans, it's certainly been dressed up with all these beautiful ornaments, hasn't it?