Jean-Baptiste Baillon

Jean-Baptiste Baillon, the best known of a family of Paris clockmakers, held the title of valet de chambre-horloger ordinaire to the queen and ran an exceptionally large business, buying movements and parts from specialist suppliers and selling finished watches and clocks in gold, enamel and gilt-bronze cases. Watches signed 'Baillon à Paris' survive in many museums and are often catalogued with the names of their case makers and enamellers, which shows how much of a luxury Paris watch was the work of separate trades.

How to recognise the work: dials and movements are signed Baillon à Paris or J. B. Baillon, and because his output was so large the movements are numbered — numbers above 3,000 occur, such as a Louvre clock movement no. 3271, and a cartel of 1749 given by the queen to her dentist is no. 2753. Signed dials and movements were sometimes reused later: a Louvre mantel clock has a Baillon dial of about 1750–1800 in a Second Empire case of 1840–60, which is why its catalogue date is given in two parts.

Born in Paris in 1702, the son of the clockmaker Jean-Baptiste Denis Baillon and grandson of a clockmaker from Rouen, he became a master in 1727 and kept a shop on the place Dauphine at the sign of 'La Belle Image', later in the rue Dauphine. Exceptionally, his watches were made in a manufactory at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, run from 1748 to 1757 by Jean Jodin, where many workmen worked for him alone; Ferdinand Berthoud described it in 1753 as 'a kind of manufactory', and its watches and clocks were set with diamonds as well as enamel.

Baillon bought a succession of court posts, including valet de chambre-horloger ordinaire to the queen and, in 1770, to the dauphine Marie-Antoinette; his clients included the Spanish royal family and the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne. He closed the Saint-Germain manufactory in 1765 and died a very rich man in 1772; the remaining stock was sold at auction in 1773.