Instruments · Sundial
Sundial - Magnetic Azimuth, Jacques Senecal, Dieppe, France, c. 1660
- Maker / attribution
- Jacques Senecal (Maker)
- Date
- c. 1660
- Historical period
- Early Modern Horology (1600 – 1750)
- Country of origin
- France
- Place
- Dieppe, France
- Object type
- Sundial
- Dimensions
- 8.5 cm (Length), 7 cm (Width), 1.5 cm (Height)
- Holding institution
- Museums Victoria, Melbourne
- Accession / object no.
- ST 25187
- Catalogue title (original)
- Sundial - Magnetic Azimuth, Jacques Senecal, Dieppe, France, circa 1660 (English)
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Record summary
Held and catalogued by Museums Victoria, Melbourne (object number ST 25187), this is a sundial by Jacques Senecal, made in Dieppe, France, dated c. 1660. The Atlas places it in the Early Modern Horology period (1600 – 1750) of its Instruments collection. Recorded dimensions: 8.5 cm (Length), 7 cm (Width), 1.5 cm (Height). 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
Summary — Museums Victoria
Portable sundial made by Jacques Senecal, Dieppe, France, circa 1660.
Physical description — Museums Victoria
The upper lid contains a horizontal sundial for latitude 50 degrees north (the latitude of northern France). When the lid is opened a pivoted metal arm enables the user to set the lid at any altitude, by the scale inside the lid, thereby creating an equatorial sundial. The underside of the lid contains a rotating disc, which provides the approximate time of the Moon's transit in accordance with its age. The inside box gives a list of French towns and their latitudes, the cardinal directions, and a compass marked with hours as an analemmatic dial.
Provenance
Donation from Mrs W. E. Blackall, May 1960
Historical context
Early Modern Horology (1600 – 1750)
Huygens' pendulum and balance spring transform accuracy; English makers develop the anchor and deadbeat escapements.
Pocket sundials, Butterfield dials and sandglasses remained essential companions to imperfect clocks; navigators used sandglasses and the log line; observatories began to combine telescopes with pendulum clocks.
Read the period in the timelineMore instruments from this periodEarlier: Renaissance Horology
Atlas type guide
Sundials and solar time-finders
A sundial tells time from the position of a shadow cast by a gnomon or style. Because the sun's apparent motion depends on latitude, every fixed dial is laid out for a particular latitude, and portable dials either carry a latitude scale or are made for one region. Sundials show local apparent solar time, which drifts against mean (clock) time by up to about sixteen minutes over the year — the equation of time.
Portable dials were the pocket instruments of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Nuremberg and Augsburg workshops produced folding ivory diptych dials with inset compasses; English and French makers sold brass horizontal dials, ring dials and the Butterfield type; Japanese and Chinese makers had their own traditions of compass dials. After mechanical watches became reliable, dials remained in use for setting them, and nineteenth-century heliochronometers were built to correct directly for the equation of time.
What to look for
- The latitude engraved on the dial plate or a latitude arc on the gnomon — it shows where the dial was meant to be used.
- The type of hour lines: equal (equinoctial) hours, Italian or Babylonian hours counted from sunset or sunrise, or unequal temporal hours on early and Islamic instruments.
- An inset magnetic compass and whether a magnetic-declination mark is drawn on its card — a useful dating clue because declination changes over time.
- Maker's signatures and town marks: Nuremberg compass-makers (Kompassmacher) often struck a personal mark and the town's punch.
- Additional scales such as lunar volvelles, wind roses, perpetual calendars or lists of cities with their latitudes.
Dating clues
- Ivory diptych dials are characteristic of Nuremberg between about 1500 and 1700.
- Butterfield-type dials with a bird-shaped adjustable gnomon point to Paris workshops from the late seventeenth century onward.
- Equation-of-time tables engraved on the plate became common after the mid-seventeenth century, once pendulum clocks made the difference between solar and mean time obvious.
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:The history timeline
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