Clocks · Clock
Carved oak and brass mounted water clock in the 17th century manner
- Maker / attribution
- Unrecorded in source
- Date
- 1696
- Historical period
- Early Modern Horology (1600 – 1750)
- Country of origin
- Unrecorded in source
- Object type
- Clock
- Materials / technique
- brass, oak
- Auction house
- Gardiner Houlgate (auction house), Corsham
- Lot
- Sale 16, lot 3609
- Credit line
- Auction lot record: lot 3609, Miscellaneous Horology & Watch Makers Workshop, Gardiner Houlgate (23rd October 2020)
- Catalogue title (original)
- Interesting carved oak and brass mounted water clock in the 17th century manner, the lower plaque dated 1696, 29" x 6.5" (English)
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Record summary
Catalogued by Gardiner Houlgate (auction house), Corsham (lot Sale 16, lot 3609), this is a clock, dated 1696. The Atlas places it in the Early Modern Horology period (1600 – 1750) of its Clocks collection. Materials and techniques recorded by the source: brass, oak. The record is illustrated with 1 photograph.
Assembled from the source record's structured fields. Dates and attributions are given as the source states them; where a field is missing the Atlas leaves it blank rather than estimating.
Catalogue description
Lot description — Gardiner Houlgate
Interesting carved oak and brass mounted water clock in the 17th century manner, the lower plaque dated 1696, 29" x 6.5"
Historical context
Early Modern Horology (1600 – 1750)
Huygens' pendulum and balance spring transform accuracy; English makers develop the anchor and deadbeat escapements.
Huygens's pendulum (1656–57) improved clock accuracy from about a quarter of an hour to under a minute a day. The anchor escapement (c. 1670) and the long seconds pendulum created the longcase clock; London makers such as Fromanteel, Knibb, Tompion and Quare led European clockmaking, and French makers created the Boulle pendule.
Read the period in the timelineMore clocks from this periodEarlier: Renaissance Horology
Atlas type guide
Water, fire and incense clocks
Before the mechanical clock, intervals and hours were measured by flow and combustion. Outflow and inflow water clocks were used in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, China and the Islamic world; Chinese and Japanese incense clocks burned powdered incense along a maze-like path; oil-lamp clocks with graduated glass reservoirs were popular in German-speaking Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
These timekeepers needed constant correction and could not keep the hour automatically for long periods, but they underpinned temple ritual, legal procedure, astronomy and the earliest monumental astronomical clocks such as Su Song's clock tower (1090s) and al-Jazari's designs (1206).
What to look for
- Graduated vessels or glass reservoirs with hour scales.
- Incense trays with stencils for laying the powder trail.
- Pewter oil-lamp clocks with a glass reservoir marked in Roman numerals.
Dating clues
- Oil-lamp clocks are mostly eighteenth century and often reproduced later.
- Incense clocks were made in China and Japan into the twentieth century.
General guidance written by the Atlas editors about this kind of object. It is not a statement about this particular piece; for that, rely on the source record above and on physical examination.
Read next:Su Song's astronomical clock tower
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