Dutch influence. Eighteenth Century. From which firebacks were made at Ashburnham, Sussex.
(By the courtesy of Charles Dawson, Esq., F.S.A., Lewes.)
The size of the wooden pattern is slightly larger than the resultant fireback, owing to the shrinkage of the metal on cooling. This diminution in design is a factor in the potter's art, when figures in some cases lose nearly a third of their original proportions when moulded in the clay prior to firing.
Firebacks have attracted a considerable amount of interest. There are many collectors, and a great deal of close study has been applied to the subject. Country museums in the vicinity of the Weald of Sussex and Kent contain many notable examples, especially those of Lewes, Hastings, Brighton, Rochester, Maidstone, and Guildford. In the first mentioned there are some very rare and beautiful examples of Sussex firebacks.
Especially interesting in connection with the Sussex ironworks is the illustration (p. [309]) of a clock face made by a local maker, Beeching of Ashburnham, in the late seventeenth century. This brass dial of a thirty-hour clock, with single hand and alarum, is ornamented with designs showing various phases of the iron industry as carried on in Sussex. There is a cannon with diminutive figures holding the match. There are cannon-balls, and a liliputian fireback with a crown on it. Men with pickaxes, men felling trees, and others tending the furnaces, symbolise the business of a foundry.
It was not until 1690 that the minute numerals were placed outside the minute divisions in clock faces, so that this face, having the minute numerals absent and the minute divisions in the inner circle, presumably belongs to the late seventeenth century.
Grandfather Clocks.—A volume on cottage and farmhouse furniture would be incomplete without some reference to grandfather clocks. At the beginning of the eighteenth century this type of clock had become popular. The early brass-bracket clock known as "Cromwellian," varying from six to ten inches in height, had a spring. With the use of the long pendulum and revolving drums, around which catgut is wound to support the heavy weights, these unprotected parts required a wooden case.
The "lantern" or "bird-cage" clocks (wallclocks from which the pendulum and weights hung unprotected) lasted till about 1680, when the first grandfather type with wood case came into use.
The early examples with cases exhibiting fine marquetry are outside the scope of the class of furniture now under consideration. In such specimens there is frequently a round or oval opening covered with glass in the centre of the panel.
In earlier types the metal dial is square, and later it became lunetted at top, and the wood case had a corresponding curve. In clocks made for great houses there were chimes, and their works were by well-known town makers. But in cottage examples, instead of the eight-day movement, more often than not the clock only ran for twenty-four hours. There is little attempt at ornament in these plain oak varieties. The case is soundly constructed, and sometimes, in exceptional examples, the head is surmounted by brass ball finials, as in the finer examples. As a rule the country cabinet-maker confined himself to an ornamental scrolled head. In later examples the metal dial—and these come at the beginning of the nineteenth century—is painted with some rustic scene with figures, and frequently there is a revolving dial showing the days of the month.