Clocks · Clock
Picture clock with Alster panorama
- Maker / attribution
- Unrecorded in source
- Date
- 1830s
- Historical period
- Precision & Scientific Horology (1750 – 1850)
- Country of origin
- Austria
- Place
- Vienna
- Object type
- Clock
- Materials / technique
- oil paint, sheet iron
- Dimensions
- width: 89 centimetre; height: 74.2 centimetre
- Holding institution
- Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte
- Accession / object no.
- 2010-1388
- Credit line
- Object data: Wikidata (CC0), holding collection Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte; museum record data.europeana.eu (opens another website in a new tab)
- Catalogue title (original)
- Picture clock with Alster panorama (English)
View the Wikidata record ↗ (opens another website in a new tab)Suggest a correction
Record summary
Held and catalogued by Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (object number 2010-1388), this is a clock, made in Vienna, Austria, dated 1830s. The Atlas places it in the Precision & Scientific Horology period (1750 – 1850) of its Clocks collection. Materials and techniques recorded by the source: oil paint, sheet iron. Recorded dimensions: width: 89 centimetre; height: 74.2 centimetre. The record is illustrated with 6 photographs.
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
Wikipedia — Picture clock with Alster panorama (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The Picture clock with Alster panorama, also known as the Coffeeparty on the Alster with view over Lombard Bridge to the city, is a picture clock or music box painting (Spieluhr-Gemälde) – an oil painting of a landscape scene with integrated mechanical clock, automata and music box – that is in the collection of the Museum for Hamburg History. 74 cm x 89 cm in size, it was made between 1827 and 1830 by an unknown group of artists and craftsmen. It was restored in 2012 by the museum and watchmaker Helmut Tüxen.
Wikidata description
painting with clocks, musical and movements mechanism in Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte
Historical context
Precision & Scientific Horology (1750 – 1850)
Harrison solves longitude; Mudge invents the lever; Breguet's Paris workshop defines the modern watch.
The age of the deadbeat escapement, compensated pendulums and observatory regulators. Domestic clocks spread through the middle classes: English longcase and bracket clocks, French gilt-bronze mantel clocks, Viennese Biedermeier wall clocks, Black Forest painted-shield clocks, and the first American shelf clocks.
Read the period in the timelineMore clocks from this periodEarlier: Early Modern Horology
Atlas type guide
Astronomical, musical and automaton clocks
Astronomical clocks display more than the hour: the positions of the sun and moon in the zodiac, the phase of the moon, the calendar, sometimes the planets and eclipses. From Richard of Wallingford's and Giovanni de' Dondi's fourteenth-century clocks to the Prague Orloj and the Strasbourg cathedral clocks, they demonstrated the order of the cosmos. Renaissance makers in Augsburg and Nuremberg built celestial globe clocks and monstrance clocks as princely treasures.
Automaton and musical clocks entertained as well as informed: figures move, birds sing, organs and carillons play tunes from pinned cylinders. The eighteenth-century trade with China ('sing-songs') and Ottoman Turkey created a market for elaborate English, Swiss and French automata.
What to look for
- Subsidiary dials for moon phase, calendar, zodiac and planetary positions.
- Celestial globes or armillary spheres turned by the movement.
- Pinned cylinders, bellows and pipes or bells for music.
- Figures on cams and levers; separate trains for automaton work.
Dating clues
- Renaissance astronomical table and globe clocks: c. 1550–1650.
- English and Swiss automaton clocks for the Chinese market: c. 1760–1820.
- Picture clocks (clockwork pictures) are mostly nineteenth 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.
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