New gallery for Clocks and
Watches
The Sir Harry and Lady Djanogly
Gallery
Opens November 2008
Room 38-39
Admission free
This winter a new gallery devoted to the display of its
magnificent collections of Clocks and Watches will open at the
British Museum. The measurement of time is something we nowadays
take for granted, but the process and practice of marking time has
come a very long way from its origins in the late medieval period.
The new gallery will present the exciting and fascinating story of
timekeeping and its development from the earliest church and
monastic clocks to the innovations of the 16th and 17th centuries
through to the advent of atomic timekeeping in the twentieth
century.
The British Museum holds the national
collection of horology, housing over 900 stunning clocks and 4,500
watches in its collection. Key examples will go on display in a
central new gallery space at the top of the main stairs. The
gallery will tell the history of timekeeping in a broad chronology,
examining the changing technology of clocks and watches, the ways
in which they work and were made, and their impact upon our
society. Magnificent examples will show how clocks and watches
became demonstrations of wealth and status prior to the development
of a mass market in the 20th century.
Beginning in the late 13th century,
mechanical timekeeping developed as cathedrals and monasteries
began to install the new clocks to announce the time both day and
night. The earliest example on display is a mid-15th century
spring-driven clock made in Burgundy during the reign of Philip the
Good. Clocks became a much desired luxury with the introduction of
spring-driven mechanisms in the 15th century, the gallery will
include one of only two surviving examples of this kind of clock
from this date. As technology progressed in the 16th century clocks
began to be used a status symbols. Extraordinary clocks such as
Hans Schlottheim’s amazing automated nef – a medieval galleon which
moved, played music and fired canon and the truly spectacular
mechanical celestial globe made in 1575 by Eberhardt Baldewein for
the Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel were the envy of the age.
The ingenuity of Galileo and Christian Huygens ensured the clock
was transformed into an accurate timekeeper with the introduction
of the pendulum in the mid-17th century. The ensuing
period (until the early 18th century) was the Golden Age of English
clock-making as Joseph Knibb, Thomas Tompion and George Graham
honed their art. The gallery will look at innovations in
timekeeping at sea during this period, how marine chronometers were
essential tools for the work of George Vancouver and Charles
Darwin. Bringing the story up to the present day, the gallery will
take a brief look at how clocks have changed in the 20th and 21st
centuries.
The gallery will also tell the story of the
development of watches, from their invention in the early years of
the 16th century to the radio-controlled watch of today. Many
examples of masters in their field - Ghylis van Gheele, David
Bouguet, Thomas Tompion, Thomas Mudge, John Arnold and Thomas
Earnshaw will be on display. Watches by the great Parisian maker
Abraham Louis Breguet’s can be seen alongside a watch by a
celebrated modern master, George Daniels. Spectacular watches from
the 18th century will contrast with mass market examples produced
in the second half of the 19th century, and the contemporary quartz
watches of today.
The gallery is supported by Sir Harry and Lady
Djanogly.
For further information or images please
contact Hannah Boulton or Katrina Whenham on 020 7323 8522 / 8583
or hboulton@britishmuseum.org
/ kwhenham@britishmuseum.org
For public information please telephone 020
7323 8000 / 8299
Notes to Editors:
- The gallery opening is accompanied by the publication of a new
book ‘Watches’. A fascinating and gloriously illustrated history of
watches as timepieces and works of art. The book is published by
British Museum press, priced £25.