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Photo: Courtesy Winterthur Museum and Country Estate, Del., Photo by Laszlo Bodo
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Tall case clock

Object number

RIF783

Maker

Clockmaker William Claggett, 1694–1749
Maker, possibly by Job Townsend, Sr., 1699–1765
Casemaker Unknown

Dimensions

Height: 104 1/2 in. (265.431 cm) Width, cornice: 20 1/2 in. (52.07 cm) Width, shaft: 13 7/8 in. (35.243 cm) Width, pedestal: 18 in. (45.72 cm) Width, base: 20 3/8 in. (51.753 cm) Depth, cornice: 10 3/4 in. (27.305 cm) Depth, shaft: 7 1/4 in. (18.415 cm) Depth, pedestal: 9 1/2 in. (24.13 cm) Depth, base: 10 1/2 in. (26.67 cm) Dial, less lunette: 12 × 12 in. (30.48 × 30.48 cm)

Date

1740–49

Current location

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Geography

Made in Newport, Rhode Island
(view a map of Rhode Island)

Medium

Mahogany (primary); yellow poplar (boards of hood top and back and shaft backboard); red maple (hood runners and seat board)

Marks

"William Claggett Newport," engraved on dial

Inscriptions

"N F / I 32" in graphite, on seat board; "14 Day N 03 / Feb ru 12 fl[oor?]" in chalk, on case backboard; "Moses [?] P--tkin," incised on case backboard

Provenance

William Boerum Wetmore (1849–1919), New York and Newport, Rhode Island; sold by his estate to William Hiram Burlingham, Bristol, Rhode Island; sold to Clapp and Graham, New York; sold to C. W. Lyon, Inc., New York; sold to George Coe Graves, Osterville, Massachusetts, 1929; given to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1930

Associated names

George Coe Graves
William Boerum Wetmore
William Hiram Burlingham
Clapp and Graham
C. W. Lyon, Inc.

See also

Bibliography

Morrison H. Heckscher, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Late Colonial Period, The Queen Anne and Chippendale Styles (New York: Random House, 1985), 294–95, 362, no. 190, ill.
Ruth Ralston, "The Exhibition in the American Wing of an Anonymous Gift," Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 27 (February 1931): 36.
Patricia E. Kane et al., Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture, 1650–1830, exh. cat. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 2016), 223n3.
Donald L. Fennimore and Frank L. Hohmann III, Claggett: Newport's Illustrious Clockmakers (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, 2018), 104–5, 147–48, 200–203, 244, no. 16, WC-57, fig. 2.11, 2.12, 2.13, 5.18.