Robert Robin

Robert Robin held the titles of clockmaker to the king and to the queen in the 1780s. He made astronomical regulators and fine clocks in cases by leading Paris bronziers and cabinetmakers, and he devised the 'Robin escapement', a detached escapement for watches and clocks. His regulators, with seconds pendulums and often equation-of-time work, belong to the French tradition of scientific clockmaking that also included Berthoud and Lepaute.

How to recognise the work: dials and movements are signed Robin or Robin à Paris, often with his court title. Like other Paris clockmakers he supplied movements to be cased by bronziers and cabinetmakers, so the case may carry another maker's name — the catalogue includes a clock of about 1785 recorded under the bronze-maker Robert Osmond. Signatures in the name can also belong to his successors, so a date from the style and movement comes first.

Robin devised a detached ('libre') escapement in 1791 and described it in a memoir of 1793–94; it combines features of the detent escapement, efficient but delicate, with those of the lever, which is safer in use. He was also among the first in France to use the lever escapement in watches. During the Revolution, when France briefly adopted decimal time, he presented to the National Convention an astronomical clock with decimal seconds and a decimal strike.

Works associated with him include a clock of 1785 made for Marie-Antoinette, now in the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, the movement of a mahogany and gilt-bronze floor-standing regulator of 1787 at the Petit Trianon, and the movement of the queen's 'Vestals' clock of 1788 in the Musée des Arts décoratifs.