THE BRASS LANTERN CLOCK

The domestic clock—Its use as a bracket or wall clock—Seventeenth-century types—Continuance of manufacture in provinces—Their appeal to the collector.

The form of the lantern clock is one that appeals to the artist. We love the candelabrum with candles, with its finely, fashioned brass forms, Dutch and English. It adds a grace to the interiors of the old masters of the Low Countries. Nobody is especially interested in the gas bracket or the paraffin lamp. There is the picture of The Doctor by Luke Fildes, but here the lamp only adds to the poverty and anguish of the scene. It is realistic and had to be there, and it makes a great factor in the lighting. But the chandelier with candles is the most beloved by the artist who inclines to the primitive, as we all do. The electric light must come into art and it does. The lift and the telephone are facts, but they are difficult, naked and unashamed as they are, to clothe with Æsthetic drapery. The cubist and the modern pseudo-scientific realist revel in incongruities repellent to art. They seize these as their own, and make them in their presentation more repellent.

Happily the clock has not received the attention of the modern sensation-monger. We are left with the heritage of the past undisturbed. He may gibe at the paint and canvas of old masters, he may deride the grace of the Greek in sculpture, but the simple mechanism of the clock symbolizing "the inaudible and noiseless foot of Time" mocks the charlatan of a little day, with oblivion tracking his scurrying heels.

The name of lantern clock may puzzle the modern collector, but its shape followed the lantern of the period, and, like the lantern, it was made to hang on the wall. We illustrate (p. 47) a silver ship's lantern of the period of Christian IV of Denmark, of the late sixteenth century, with the King's monogram. It was doubtless used in the expedition round the North Cape. It is in the collection at Rosenborg Castle at Copenhagen. This lantern shape is found in German clocks of the period, and in English seventeenth-century clocks the same shape is continued. A fine example by Bartholomew Newsam is illustrated (p. 47), showing the early type conforming to the lantern design.

Not only the form but the usage determined the name. The lantern had spikes or metal hooks to hang upon. The clock similarly was affixed to a wall, and we know it as a bracket clock, because, whether on a wall or on a bracket, it had chains and weights suspended beneath it, as it was not in its early form capable of being placed on a table.

We think lovingly of it as belonging to a past that is something more than tapestry figures moving in a misty background. To watch the revolving pinions of a Stuart clock is to hear the echoes of the past reverberate. It requires no gramophone to reproduce dead voices, nor a cinema picture to recall bygone incidents and happenings. One can listen to the same monotone calling forth the departure of the seconds that awakened George Herbert from a reverie and beat rhythmically to his carefully wrought verse. The same hand pointed to midnight that beckoned Lovelace from his revels. We are reminded of Justice Shallow's "we have heard the chimes at midnight,"—an old man's boast of rollicking gaiety. The trite engraved words Tempus fugit drew a thousand sweet sounds from golden-mouthed Herrick, who sang of fading roses and counselled maids "with Daffodils and Daisies crowned" to make the most of their charms. Vanitas vanitatum, all is vanity; the sadness of it all, the flying hours that no man can recall, the long slow shadow that creeps across the grass—this is the message of the poets; and when they pause for a moment from the dance in the sunlight to think of time, it is Time the ancient reaper with the scythe, who cuts down the young flowers ruthlessly with the fateful sweep of his blade.

Its Use as a Bracket or Wall Clock.—Old engravings of clocks and of clockmakers' workshops show clocks on the wall with the weights suspended beneath the brass case. Such a clock usually went for thirty hours. That is, it was usual to wind it by pulling up the chains once a day, a method retained, in long-case clocks of thirty-hour duration, by provincial makers a couple of centuries later in England.

It is obvious that these clocks stand apart from the era of the spring as a driving force, being weight-driven, and are before the introduction of the pendulum as a regulator of the mechanism impelled by the weights.

As timekeepers they never can bear comparison with the later type with the long pendulum. They stand as examples of early clockmaking, with fine brass dials, with artistic appearance, simple and unpretentious, but lacking the real scientific application of further developed principles of a succeeding period.

A clock that could only be used as a bracket clock or a wall clock with weights beneath hardly filled the requirements of an age when domestic furniture demanded luxury and exquisite taste. The personal clock—that is, the watch—offered more possibilities.

The advent of the pendulum came just at a time when the art of the clockmaker required the necessary impetus to carry him to newer and more extended fields. The invention revolutionized the domestic clock.

As to the clocks used by the wealthy classes in England at the year 1685, one recalls the death-bed scene of Charles II as described by Macaulay: "The morning light began to peep through the windows of Whitehall; and Charles desired the attendants to pull aside the curtains, that he might have one more look at the day. He remarked that it was time to wind up a clock that stood near his bed. These little circumstances were long remembered, because they proved beyond dispute that, when he declared himself a Roman Catholic, he was in full possession of his faculties. He apologized to those who had stood round him all night for the trouble which he caused. He had been, he said, a most unconscionable time dying; but he hoped that they would excuse it. This was the last glimpse of that exquisite urbanity so often found potent to charm away the resentment of a justly incensed nation. Soon after dawn the speech of the dying man failed."

It was Bacon who wrote, a century before: "If a man be in sickness or pain, the time will seem longer without a clock or hour-glass than with it."

The question arises as to what particular kind of clock was at the bedside of Charles II that he should notice that it required winding. It may have been usual to wind it at that particular time every morning, being, as it undoubtedly was, a thirty-hour clock conveniently wound the same time every day. But it is more probable that the King saw that it wanted winding by the position of the weights.

Seventeenth-century Types.—The idea of the pendulum had been in men's minds since the days of Leonardo da Vinci, but Christopher Huygens, the Dutch astronomer and mechanician, applied it to the clock. At first it was placed in front of the dial and swung from the top. The illustration we give (p. 51) shows an early clock with this device. The pendulum was next placed at the back (see adjacent illustration, p. 51), and later inside the clock.

We illustrate several types of the lantern clock showing its changing form from a slender and graceful clock, with the dial in correct proportion, to the later type, when the dial projected beyond the body of the clock. When the bell was placed at the top and ornamented by a brass terminal, the name applied to the clock was "birdcage," and pictures by the old Dutch masters show birdcages of this shape hanging in ladies' boudoirs.

It will be observed that as a rule the dials are circular, consisting of the hour plate without the four spandrels. But we illustrate an example of a square dial by John Bushman, London, about 1680, with crown and verge escapement, with short pendulum, and alarum with striking and going trains run by same weight. It will be observed that these clocks have only one hand—the hour hand. In the example above mentioned (see Frontispiece), the dial has an inner circle showing quarters of an hour. The hand, as illustrated, has passed one quarter and half of the next; it is therefore about twenty-two and a half minutes past three. There is also an alarum marked with arabic figures one to twelve. (An enlargement of this dial is illustrated p. 163)

The other specimens we illustrate exhibit slightly varying characteristics.

The brass lantern clock illustrated (p. 55) has chains and weights. It is a thirty-hour clock, with striking but no alarum movement. It has a short pendulum behind the back plate.

The use of an anchor-shaped pendulum brought a winged screen into fashion to conceal its movement. The example illustrated (p. 55) shows this style. This also is a bracket clock with chains supporting the weights.

But the bracket clock did not stop at this stage. On the introduction of the long or seconds pendulum this new mechanism was embodied in brass clocks, and the illustration (p. 57) of an example about 1700 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, shows this type. A fine brass lantern clock by Thomas Tompion is at the British Museum, an illustration of which is given (p. 61).

Continuance of Manufacture in the Provinces.—Long after the long-case clock was in general use in London, the brass clock with weights and pendulum was extensively made in the provinces. Examples are found by local makers up to the early years of the nineteenth century. In a measure this continuance of an obsolete form is parallel with the village cabinet-maker's furniture. Generation after generation produced oak chairs and settles in Stuart form, and when Chippendale seized the world of fashion, it was not till long afterwards that village craftsmen made chairs in the Chippendale manner—but in yew, in beech, and in sycamore, never in mahogany. Even Sheraton's satinwood elegance in delicate tapered legs found an echo in elm and beech. It is such naÏvetÉ which is delightful to the collector, and in provincial clocks he will find a study equally rewarded by extraordinary anachronisms and singular adaptations within the compass of the local maker.

For instance, the marquetry of the village carpenter is always a hundred years behind the time. His engraving on dials is of the same character as that on his local coffin-plates or his tombstones. His painted dials often exhibit native touches difficult to equal.

Their Appeal to Collectors.—Anything that appeals to collectors, whether it be Morland's colour prints or Wheatley's Cries of London, old Sheffield plate, Stuart cane-back chairs or Sheraton tea-caddies, pays the usual tribute which the antique pays to posterity. As imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, a thousand replicas start up to supply a demand. The man of taste says that such and such a thing is unique in its art-appeal to him. The man of money seeks to prove that it is not unique and buys as many uniques and antiques as his distended banking account will allow. We find this applies to lantern clocks. Birmingham has turned out thousands of these brass clocks in replica of seventeenth-century styles. Sometimes as much as ten pounds is asked for them, and sometimes it is found that an old maker's name has been added to the dial. There is no particular harm in any man having replicas of fine old objects of art in his house if he likes the styles and cannot afford originals. But it is a pity that any one should ever pay more than replica price for a copy. That is foolishness, and outside the realm of collecting.

Perhaps it is a wise dispensation of Providence that the man of wealth can possess the originals and that the poor man and the man of taste must content himself with copies. It was Balzac who chalked up in his garret, "Here is a Velasquez," "Here is an Andrea del Sarto." Lovers of the real can impart to the modern replicas purchased for a few pounds the spirit of the old examples. It is the same artistic impulse which accepts the translation in lieu of the original. Through FitzGerald we read Omar. Horatius Flaccus, who appeals to the esoteric with his odi profanum vulgus, is filtered through a Western tongue. One is grateful to see plaster casts in the British Museum of the Three Fates from the Parthenon at Athens. Echoes suggest so much to those who have the inner spirit to conjure up the original.