LONG-CASE CLOCK.
Eight-day movement. Mahogany case inlaid with satinwood shell designs and banding.
Maker, James Hatton, London (1800-12).
Brick design in base in Chippendale manner.
(By courtesy of Messrs. D. Sherratt & Co., Chester.)
Another illustration (p. [139]) shows the typical classical style. The case was designed by Robert Adam, and is in date about 1775. The dial becomes circular, and owes certain of its decoration to French form, although it is surmounted by a Greek urn, but the flying garlands betray it. The waist becomes tapered, terminating in a base of graceful proportions and reticent ornament. The fluted work and the scroll indicate the design of the architect. One can imagine such a chaste clock finding itself in the cold, un-English environment of Ken Wood, or on the staircase of some learned society, with candelabra of bronze of classic design, with hoofs as feet and with the Roman lamp throwing out its modern flame. The movement of this clock is by Stephen Rimbault, of Great St. Andrew Street, about 1775.
Another example of a clock by James Hatton, London (about 1810), exhibits several new features. Its case is of rich feathered mahogany, inlaid in the Sheraton manner with satinwood shells, banding, and herring-bone stringing. The hood is massive and reverts to an earlier period, and the ornament of the base, in brickwork style, was known to have been employed by Chippendale. The finials are brass. The dial is brass, and in the lunette are painted a ship and a cottage (illustrated p. [145]).
For the continuation of these styles one must turn to the provincial makers (Chapter [VIII]), showing a variety of decoration and touches of incongruity in style and anachronism in date—a glorious intermingling of contemporary with bygone features, affording unequalled delight to the collector. In the case of provincial made furniture, whole districts carried on fashions for a quarter of a century or longer after they had been forgotten in London, and the clock-case is no exception.
Included in this period is the fine clock (illustrated p. [149]) by Robert Molyneux and Sons, London, 1825, now in the Bristol Museum. It has one main dial recording minutes, and two smaller dials showing hours and seconds respectively. The main dial has two hands, which indicate Greenwich mean time and Bristol time. The type is known as a "regulator" clock, with the twenty-four-hour dial and other additions appertaining to the astronomical clock. The illustration shows the time to be: Greenwich, 11.42 (i.e. 42 minutes past 11 o'clock); Bristol, 11.32 (i.e. 10 minutes difference). The clock has a mercury pendulum. There was a somewhat similar clock constructed by Dell, of Bristol.