A small and rare late 17th century olivewood veneered quarter repeating basket-top table clock by this respected London maker.

The case is veneered in well-figured olivewood of good colour and patination, the front door incorporating oyster veneers and fitted with a pierced brass escutcheon. There is an overhanging moulded cornice and a stepped caddy top, surmounted by a shallow repoussé basket with richly worked panels of flowers, scrolling foliage and birds, backed in red silk. It is finished with four acorn finials at the corners and a finely cast handle with dolphin decoration. Each side has a plain glazed rectangular window and the rear door is similarly glazed with a moulded edge and matching escutcheon. It stands on a moulded base with four wooden block feet.

The 6-inch dial has a silvered chapter ring engraved with Roman hour numerals and Arabic five-minute markers, and distinctive fleur-de-lys half-hour marks set against an inner quarter-hour track. The finely matted centre has a small calendar aperture, framed by cast winged cherub-head spandrels, and is fitted with finely pierced blued steel hands.

The movement is of 8-day duration with twin gut fusees and five knopped and ringed pillars, driving a knife-edge verge escapement behind a shaped apron. It strikes the hours on a bell by rack work, and the hours and quarters are repeated on demand by pulling the cord at the right-hand side, sounding on the hour bell and a further smaller bell for the quarter work. The backplate is finely engraved with tulips and scrolling foliage and signed ‘Jacobus Hazenius At Wight Hall’ within a foliate cartouche.

Date: circa 1690
Height: 13 in (33 cm)

Jacobus (James) Hassenius is recorded as a Russian-born watch and clockmaker working in London, and was made a Free Brother of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in January 1682/3. He paid quarterage until 1697, after which it is generally thought he returned to Russia—timing that aligns closely with Peter the Great’s celebrated visit to London, when the Tsar actively recruited skilled craftsmen and technical expertise for his modernising programme.

A particularly telling document follows in 1698: Hassenius was granted a warrant permitting him to export a group of clocks and tools “to Muscovy for the use of his Imperial Majesty the Czar of Muscovy,” including long clocks and a “great table clock,” suggesting direct court patronage and the practical role London-made clocks played in Russia’s drive to import Western skill and technology. Hassenius’s Whitehall address, engraved on this clock’s backplate, underlines a prestigious London presence at the very centre of government and court life, and his surviving work is valued for its strong late-17th-century English construction paired with notably confident, decorative backplate engraving. (For further discussion, see Keith Stella, “James or Jacob Hassenius, a clock- and watchmaker in London and Moscow”, Antiquarian Horology, March 2024; and S. Dzik, Engraving on English Table Clocks: Art on a Canvas of Brass 1660–1800, Wild Boar Publications, 2019, ref. H3-3.)

HW6661