Description:
Patent alarm time piece, also known as a lighthouse clock, inscribed on the dial: "SIMON WILLARD AND SON'S / PATENT" and enclosed with the original, colorless glass dome with a ball and cap finial and sitting on the lower case. Simon Willard (1753-1848) patented his alarm clock in 1819, which emulated the virtuosity of European "skeleton" clocks with their elaborate, exposed mechanisms. Willard's patent promised that "when let off the clock strikes on the top of the case of the clock, and makes a noise like someone rapping at the door, and it will wake you much quicker than to strike on a bell in the usual way." By the time that the clock went into production, Willard had substituted the 'rap' with a conventional bell above the movement. This clock was then expensively cased in mahogany (or sometimes a tinned sheet iron) pedestal and placed under a glass dome. As Willard described in his patent application: "The whole of the clock work is enclosed with a handsome glass and it is wound up without taking the glass off, which prevents dirt from getting into it. The whole plan of the clock I claim as my invention. The pendulum is suspended upon and connected with the pivot." Although likely sold into the 1840s, these clocks were viewed as expensive and eccentric, which compromised any broad appeal, and few examples have survived. If a clock was desired to keep accurate time and sent the message of status, the reputation of the Willard family for fine, eight-day timepieces drew patrons from throughout northeastern United States. The eldest brother, Benjamin Willard (1743-1803), was the first of three generations of Willard clock and watch makers who started working in Grafton, Mass., in 1766; when the clockmaker Nathaniel Mulliken Sr. of Lexington, Mass., died in 1767, Benjamin moved there and took over his business, while his younger brothers, Aaron (1757-1844) and Simon, stayed behind in Grafton continuing to make clocks and watch repairs. Simon also experimented with new forms that reduced the size of clock movements, and in 1801, introduced a wall clock with a patented design (patented 1802) with its Patent Timepiece movement, later known as a "banjo" clock. Benjamin Willard set up shop in Roxbury in 1771, followed by Simon and Aaron whose names first appear on the tax roles in 1783, each working in a separate location. Their sons and a grandson continued the profession: Simon's sons, Simon Jr. (1795-1881) opened his own business in Boston in 1828 specializing in manufacturing chronometers and Benjamin (1803-1847) worked with his brother, and Simon Jr.'s son, Zabdiel Adams (1826-after 1911) continued making pocket chronometers. Aaron's son, Aaron Jr. (1783-1864) took over the business in 1823 which Aaron Sr. had moved to Boston about 1792, and Henry (1802-1887), specialized in making clock cases. The Willards turned to local sources for parts and decorative elements. Suppliers included John Doggett (1780-1857) of Roxbury who produced such items as gilded eagles, brackets or pedestals, balls, swags, and painted tablets for patent pieces, and William Hunneman who provided castings of "side pieces", bezels for the round glass, and wheel blanks. Decorative painters of dials and glass tablets such as Charles Bullard (1794-1871), Spenser Nolan, and John Ritto Penniman (1782–1841) had to understand pigments, varnish, and how to conceive their works "backwards." The clock has a brass bell mounted over the round, white-enameled clock face with black roman numerals; the hands have pierced circles below the tips; the eight-day brass and steel, weight-powered movement runs on a single weight that descends through the plinth, with a fall-off or passing strike. The clock sits on a round brass-ringed, mahogany collar, and is set on a rectangular case that has a paneled door with a brass pull knob in the front which conceals the drive and alarm weights and the pendulum, molded base, and four ball feet (may be replacements).
Label Text:
George Alfred Cluett (1873-1955), of Troy, New York, and Williamstown, Massachusetts, collected American furniture from around 1901, shortly after he and Edith Tucker were married, through the mid-1920s. Cluett was prominent among early collectors. For the first museum exhibition of American furniture, The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition, opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1909, Cluett loaned 22 objects. Cluett, whose family business became Arrow Shirts, finished collecting before Henry Francis DuPont began to amass objects for what became the core of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. The Cluett family donated most of its collection to Historic Deerfield beginning in 1960, with its last gifts given in 2003. Cluett’s keen connoisseurship, focused on Classical objects (contemporary to his grandparents’ lives) is notable as he collected before the publication of the first seminal reference books on American antiques. Moreover, the early twentieth-century collectors focused on the so-called Pilgrim Century, which predates the Classical era by over one hundred years. Cluett was particularly intrigued by the work of craftsmen including Seymour, McIntire, Phyfe, and Lannuier. Cluett’s desire for privacy, and reverence for times past has long obscured his creative connoisseurship and legacy as one of the earliest and influential collectors of American furniture.
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