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Photo: Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 25.115.42
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Tall case clock

Object number

RIF784

Maker

Casemaker Unknown
Clockmaker Gawen Brown, American, 1719–1801

Dimensions

Height: 91 3/8 in. (232.093 cm) Width, cornice: 21 1/8 in. (53.658 cm) Width, shaft: 13 7/8 in. (35.243 cm) Width, pedestal: 17 3/4 in. (45.085 cm) Width, feet: 19 3/4 in. (50.165 cm) Depth, cornice: 10 1/2 in. (26.67 cm) Depth, shaft: 7 in. (17.78 cm) Depth, pedestal: 8 7/8 in. (22.543 cm) Depth, feet: 9 7/8 in. (25.083 cm) Dial, less lunette: 12 × 12 in. (30.48 × 30.48 cm)

Date

1750–60

Current location

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Geography

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

Medium

Mahogany (primary); chestnut (backboards of hood and shaft and medial brace in hood top); white pine (hood top)

Marks

"G Brown / BOSTON," engraved on dial nameplate

Inscriptions

"J. Marvin [Norwin or Narvin?] / Apponaug [?]," in chalk inside backboard; "B[?] R T Proud," incised on the guide strip nailed to right side board behind bonnet top; "Nov[?] 15 1841 (in one hand), " and "John J Tanner / June th 29 1857 / January 11 / Sydney Maine (in another hand)," scratched on back of dial lunette

Provenance

Louis Guerineau Myers (1874–1932), New York; sold to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1925

Associated names

Louis Guerineau Myers

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), 295–97, no. 191, ill.
R. T. Haines Halsey and Elizabeth Tower, The Homes of Our Ancestors as Shown in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1935), fig. 111, opp. p. 150, ill.
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), 112n28.