Antique Carriage Clocks

It's somehow fitting that the first carriage clock made by Swiss-born watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet at the end of the 18th century was sold to Napoleon Bonaparte. After all, Napoleon was on the move a lot in that period, what with all the Napoleonic Wars and a pair of forced exiles, interrupted by 100 days in Paris. It was, in short, a time when time itself was running out for the diminutive tyrant. A portable carriage couldn't tell Napoleon how many hours he had left before his heart stopped ticking, but the clock's alarm might have awoken him every dawn for his daily dose of arsenic. During his almost half-century-long career, Breguet made less than 100 carriage clocks, compared to the almost 20,000 timepieces made by his firm, Breguet & Fils. That's why actual Breguet carriage clocks are museum pieces, found at The Frick Collection in New York and the Royal Collection Trust in London. That said, there were plenty of exceptional French carriage clocks, made by the likes of Paul Garnier, who cased his 8-day carriage clocks in glass boxes held together by sections of cast brass. In some of Garnier's early clocks from the 1830s, the front panes of these glass cases were built to slide up so that the clocks could be wound. Because of their relative fragility, these glass-cased clocks were often fitted with a second case that was made of wood and covered in leather. Time has not been kind to these pieces, though, which is why early 19th-century carriage clocks with their antique wooden cases intact are rather rare. By the middle of the 19th century, carriage clocks were getting more and more ornate. Some were gilt in gold and fairly dripped with Rococo flourishes while others betrayed Japanese influences such as frames that appeared to be made of cast bamboo. Peak carriage clock, if you will, occurred in the 1870s, and though interest in the form waned after that, these timepieces were around long enough to eventually exhibit Art Nouveau influences and then, later, the more austere and geometric lines of Art Deco. Naturally, British clockmakers were not asleep at the wheel during these decades. In fact, they would often copy the designs of the French and then equip their clocks with British fusee movements. But by the 20th century, the need for carriage clocks had abated and the form seemed quaint when one could simply wear a wristwatch. Still, carriage clocks persisted as a fond bit of nostalgia throughout century, when they were given as retirement gifts in the U.K.