Rectangular brass or ormolu case surmounted by a fold-down carrying ring. Glazed dial door; the sides of the clock comprise white porcelain plaques with jewelled ornament in red, green and blue.

Case: Rectangular brass or ormolu case surmounted by a fold-down carrying ring. Glazed dial door. The four sides fitted with rectangular plaques of white hard paste porcelain: the door plaque with a curved inner edge; the plaque to the reverse with an arched upper edge, all decorated with stamped gold-leaf foils with jewelled ornament in translucent red and green and opaque turquoise and white enamels, the symmetrical designs in neo-classical taste. The front door porcelain plaque inscribed within the cartouche 'Robin Her du Roy'. On the interior, the reverse of the porcelain plaques are lined with pale green watered silk, edged with metallic braid.

Dial: The enamel dial, 8.6cm diameter, is on a brass dial-plate, and has roman numerals, decorated with jewelled enamels to match the porcelain. The minute-marks are unnumbered. It has a smaller cartouche resembling a laurel wreath inscribed 'Robin', and in the centre, three jewelled white enamel fleur de lys. The interior winding holes are at III and VII, and the dial is signed inside the scroll above VI "Robin". The hands a pierced silver, with small applied white stones.

Movement: The movement plates are 6.cm diameter. Both trains are fit with going barrels. The going train to the right has a platform cylinder escapement (steel cylinder). The locking-plate striking train is to the left, with a count-wheel allowing a single stroke at every half-hour.

With additional fine-tooled leather carrying case, with a padded interior.

Bequeathed by John Jones

Robert Robin (1742-1799), the clockmaker who made this clock (his signature appears on a plaque below the dial) was clockmaker to Marie Antoinette and subsequently to Louis XV and Louis XVI. The clock is accompanied by a fine leather case stamped with the royal monogram of Louis XVI (the letter 'L' interlaced), surmounted by a crown. The Museum was bequeathed the clock in 1882 by John Jones; a note in the Metalwork Section register made when the clock entered the Museum observes that it had once belonged to Marie Antoinette herself.
The pendulum and escapement (the device to regulate the motion of the pendulum) are later replacements. The movement itself has been completely replaced.

The porcelain panels of this carriage clock differ in shape slightly to the ones made at the Sèvres factory. See C499, an upright rectangular clock in the Wallace Collection shaped like a secrétaire(see Savill below). They would appear to be of hard paste Paris porcelain and may have been decorated by Joseph Coteau who, although recorded at Sèvres 1780-1784, is known to have worked at the factory of the comte d'Artois in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. A marked pair of vases from this factory in the Louvre has ornate bands of jewelled enamelleing, signed 'Cotteau' and dated 11th August, 1783 (illustrated by Plinval de Guillebon, see below). This theory is reinforced by the fact that Coteau is also known to have enamelled clock dials (see Savill below, Vol III, p. 973, footnote 2 and Dawson, p. 152, footnote 27). Signed clock dials by him are dated 1763, 1771 and 1785.

The porcelain is unlikely to be Sèvres as it is unheard of a clockmaker being permitted to add his own mark to the porcelain in this manner. However, as a typical object that has been assembled by a marchand mercier, it is difficult to know when the inscriptions were added, although they would appear to be contemporary with the object as a whole. As with other typical marchand mercier objects (eg. travelling cases for porcelain services nécessaires, fitted dressing tables) the porcelain plaques have been lined with pale green watered silk, edged with metallic (possibly now tarmished silver) braid.

This clock was among a large collection of furniture, porcelain, metalwork, paintings and books owned by the tailor and businessman John Jones, and kept in cramped conditions at his house at 95, Piccadilly. In his will of 4 December 1879 and in a codicil of 22 January 1880, Jones bequeathed the objects to the South Kensington Museum, and they were transferred there after his death in 1882. The Handbook to the Jones bequest, published in 1883, marvels at the value of the gift, which seems still not to have been displayed to best advantage: 'Probably a large majority of those who visit the Jones collection will be indisposed to believe ... that so limited a space as three not large galleries in the Museum can contain furniture and decorative arts worth no less than a quarter of a million of money'. Jones' principal collecting interests lay in French eighteenth-century furniture and decorative arts, of which this clock is a splendid and rare example, as well as reflecting the late-Victorian love of rich, gilded surfaces and historical artistic styles. This is one of sixteen clocks bequeathed by John Jones to this museum.

The introduction of the travelling clock cannot be attributed to any one person or any particular period. By the late 18th century France had become the centre for the manufacture of carriage clocks, a development led by Abraham Louis Breguet with his glass sided 'pendules de voyages'. When this clock was collected by John Jones, there was a revival of interest in miniature carriage clocks during the later 19th century for French fashionable women who carried them in small leather cases.

See Harold Wise 'Telling the Time in Miniature: Travelling Clocks at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge ' Country Life 9 June 1983, pp.1546-1548.

This carriage clock was made in Paris in the early 1780s. It has all the hallmarks of a object assembed by one of the half dozen exclusive Parisian retailers of this type of luxury goods, a marchand mercier. It combines high quality gilt bronze, porcelain plaques, an enamel dial and a clock movement, all of which would have been supplied by separate specialist manufacturers. The movement was made by Robert Robin, clockmaker by appointment to King Louis XVI, a fact proudly proclaimed on the inscribed dial and plaque below (H=er du Roy is an abbreviated old French form of Horloger du Roi). The plaques are of hard-paste porcelain and were possibly made at the factory under the patronage of the King's younger brother, the comte d'Artois, in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis in Paris. In imitation of the fashion on Sèvres porcelain at the time, they have been given a costly form of 'jewelled decoration' where translucent and opaque enamels have been painted onto stamped gold foils applied to the surface of the glaze. Jewelling was popular in court circles for a brief period in the early 1780s, for example the King and Queen both bought sets of three Sèvres jewelled vases in 1782. (It is probable these are the vases now in the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Wallace Collection respectively).

Legend has it that this clock belonged to Queen Marie-Antoinette herself. Such claims of royal provenance are usually unfounded and are known in some cases to have been invented by dealers in the nineteenth century to add value to their wares. However, given the French royal fleur de lys prominently enamelled on the dial, the involvement of the King's clockmaker, the expensive and unusual decoration and the possibility the porcelain was made by a factory under royal patronage, the story may be true.

1001-1882