Cartel clock in black lacquered wood with its console, Neuchâtel, 18th century

Black lacquered wood and gilt highlights cartel clock standing on four small gilt brass foot. Case with a gilt decor of foliage motifs, topped by an openwork balcony and crowned by a gilt bronze flowered acanthus leaf stalk motif. Fluted columns topped by covered pots and finished by stylized acorns framed the dial. A quadrangular hole surrounded by a beads frieze, under the dial, lets appear the pendulum.
White background dial indicating hours in Roman numerals and minutes in Arabic numerals, all black enamelled. Gilt bronze hands in a clover motif. A glass with a gilt guilloche bronze protects the dial.
Back and interior of the case red painted.

Black lacquered wood console with gilt foliage motifs, with concave shape faces, topped by a gilt bronze balcony and finished by a gilt bronze fruit.

Work realized in the 18^th century.

The canton of Neuchâtel is one of the watchmaking cradles because the watchmaking industry is developed in Swiss mountains since the 17^th century. The manufacture of watches and clocks was organized in small handmade workshops, named “cabinets”, where clock master merchants worked together. During the 18^th century, particularly appreciated, the clocks from Neuchâtel competed with the Parisian clocks. The Swiss watchmaking industry became more important at the beginning of the 19^th century with important inventions such as the creation of the Neuchâtel’s Observatory by Henri Grandjean, to communicate by telegraph the exact hour.
However, from the second part of the century, the Swiss watchmaking was a victim of the foreign competition that was being conformed to the market, more turned to the number than the quality of items. Anyway, they continued to innovate by founding the first Swiss institute for the official controls of the watches’ function in 1893, by creating the first waterproof case or by filing the first patent of watch bracelet.
Then, the innovations in the mechanic domain permitted to the Switzerland to revive the watches production at the beginning of the 20^th century, as the birth of the first automatic watch bracelet. But the bigger Swiss invention of the century was the first analogue quartz watch, the Bêta 21, realized by the Watchmaker Electronic Centre in Neuchâtel in 1967. The Swiss watchmaking was one by one excluded from the watchmaking market, competed with Americans and Japanese and almost disappeared in the 1970’s.
She owned its miraculous comeback to the start of the Swatch digital quartz watch in 1983, which combined high quality and low price. Today, we can talk about a strong comeback of the watchmaking industry, on of the most prosperous industries of Switzerland.