Five ornate 18th-century clocks attributed to André-Charles Boulle, the furniture maker to the glamorous court of Louis XIV of France, are usually scattered around the London mansion that is home to the Wallace Collection. But now they have been brought together in what the museum has labeled its first horology exhibition.
The free display, scheduled to run through March 2, includes an oak, turtle shell and ebony mantel clock with a gilt-brass Venus perching on a shell as well as an oak, pine and ebony mantel clock that depicts time as an old man holding a bar balancing two weights, an early system that watchmakers call a foliot.
“These would have been incredibly costly to make and produce means that they would have been owned by very high-profile courtiers, politicians, tax collectors. You know, the elite of 18th-century society,” Alexander Collins, the exhibition’s curator and the museum’s curator of decorative arts, said in October while preparing the display. He was sitting next to the Venus mantel clock in the cluttered furniture and frames conservation studio on the museum’s top floor.
When the clocks are in their usual spots, he said, “people don’t often notice them, because they disappear into the noise of the Wallace, because there is so much to look at.” (“The Swing” by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, “The Lady with a Fan” by Diego Velázquez and “The Laughing Cavalier” by Frans Hals are just a few of its artworks.)
By bringing the clocks together in the ground-floor temporary exhibition space, which used to be the housekeeper’s room, the museum hopes to widen its appeal to different audiences, Mr. Collins said.
Even though the clocks have been on display for years, there is an intricate process to ready them for the exhibition — including getting four of the five back into working order.
One, which Mr. Collins called the Four Continents pedestal clock, has always kept time.
“The clocks get dusted and cleaned,” said Jürgen Huber, the museum’s senior furniture conservator. But for the exhibition, he added, each movement “gets completely dismantled, every single part gets cleaned and it’s reassembled and oiled,” before a test run “to see if we can get them as accurate as possible.”
Of course, he noted, the clocks were not really meant to be accurate timekeepers — “they were showing that you got intellect as well as money.”
Mr. Huber said that only the Venus clock, once owned by the Russian industrialist Anatole Demidoff, needed repair: A pin in the pin wheel escapement, which helps control the timekeeping, had broken off at some point in the past.
Once the part arrived, Julius Schoonhoven, a freelance clockmaker and restoration specialist, would be called in to make the repair.
Although the exhibition is small, Mr. Huber said the five clocks epitomized Baroque style and Boulle’s radical oeuvre.
“Every time he invents a new shape and new form of furniture which before didn’t really exist like that,” he said. “He makes them like sculpture.”
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