Hello Randy,
Thank you for ending in this Pennsylvania tallcase clock to mearto.com for an appraisal. I shall try to help you with that today.
TITLE:
Sheraton, cherrywood, two weight, eight day time and hourly striking, calendar tallcase clock with four hands on the dial, made by Charles Cooper, Market Square, Lebanon, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, circa 1825.
DESCRIPTION:
CASE: 96” tall, this is a cherrywood tallcase clock with the hood surmounted by a “castle-top” pediment fretwork (crest). It consists of four reeded plinths, each supporting a ringed carved wooden acorn finial. The front plinths also support the castle fret which has four scalloped sections, each scallop with rondels at both ends. There are plain undecorated cherry returns on the sides of the pediment. A reeded horizontal cornice sits above the cherry tympanum with arched cornice placed over the arched glazed dial door. The door frames are made of striped or curly cherrywood. The dial door is flanked by tapered ringed and turned cherrywood colonnettes with the capital and bases formed by multiple bulbous turnings. The door and pillars rest on a horizontal concave and reeded cornice with a concave moulding below transitioning to the trunk section with a full length cherry trunk door with four pointed top matching the styling of the crest. The door is flanked by multi-ringed and turned bulbous cherry columns (essentially a form of compressed “bun” shapes). A second concave moulding leads one down to the rectilinear base with two inset concentric panels, both flanked by half columns of tapered, ringed and turned compressed bulbous round pillars extending down to vertical reeded ankles resting on Pennsylvania Cherrywood bun feet. The sides of the case are solid, with the hood having exposed dove-tails at the front corners and the base with recessed rectangular panels. The pine backboard has several horizontal slots, typical of Lebanon cabinetry.
DIAL: This is a white painted arched iron dial, attributed to the work of Philadelphia dial painter William Jones (working c. 1822-1840). There is a black enameled Arabic hour chapter ring with closed minute track to the outside and Arabic minute markers placed every fifteen minutes. To the inside of the hours is an Arabic calendar dial and the dial center contains the original script signature of “Charles Cooper, Lebanon”. The clock has wonderful delicately handcrafted four hands on one center canon pipe. There are steel skeletonized diamond shaped hour and minute hands each with open stems, a delicate steel counterbalanced sweep seconds hand and a shorter spade shaped calendar pointer. The four spandrels are filled with colorful baskets of flowers resting on green foliage. The lunette has a revolving moon dial with an Arabic lunar month above (29 ½ days = 1 lunar month) and two stylized hemispheric maps below.
{The features that typify William Jones dial work are: peaked 1’s, over coiled tails in the 9’s and 6’s, parallel interior markings in the 2’s and 0’s and shotgun eights. Every five minutes in the minute track there are triangles. All triangles in the upper half of the dial point towards the dial center and those below point away from the dial center. The face of the moon is also typical of the art of William Jones. One final point about my own study of Jones dials deals with the so-called shotgun eights he painted. Between 1822 and 1825 the top section of the eight was slightly smaller than the round bottom section. Between 1825 and c.1835 the two sections of the eight were roughly equal in size. (See historical notes for greater detail.) The corner decoration is also typical of Jones’ dial work between the years of c. 1825-1830.}
William Jones used blackened, unsigned, rectilinear sheet iron false plates between the dials he painted and the movements the clockmakers attached. They attached their movements to the false plate and not to the dial directly, so that there would be no damage to the freshly painted dial.
Movement: Not shown but would be a rectangular solid brass plate with anchor recoil escapement, steel cut pinions, butterfly wheel and rack and snail striking, all powered by two painted iron weights which power the movement for eight days and cause striking on an overhead bell hourly. There should be a long steel pendulum with brass covered bob swinging at the back of the movement and in front of the backboard. The barrel wheels which take up the weight cords were either grooved (as the
English used) or smooth thin brass barrels which are often seen in the work of the American clockmakers.
Condition:
Case – Refinished but otherwise in excellent condition
Dial – Untouched with wear to the numerals and maps and flaking of moderate degree in the rotating moon dial. Overall good. {Do not reline or strengthen the numerals}
Movement -Not evaluated but assumed genuine, original to this case and is currently functional.
HISTORICAL COMMENTARY:
Today we still know little of Charles Cooper. James Gibbs says he owned a jewelry store (fancy goods store) on Market Square in the center of the town of Lebanon. James Whisker provides either Cooper’s life span or working dates, circa 1785-1835. When Mr. Gibbs wrote his text in 1984 he pictured three privately owned Cooper tallcase clocks, each in a different style and all privately owned and all with four hand dials. He adds, “a fourth is owned by the Lebanon County Historical Society”, a fifth with dead beat escapement and ¼ hour striking is privately owned and “perhaps another dozen Cooper clocks, some in Hepplewhite (inlaid and veneered) cases”. The type of clocks that Charles cooper made would suggest that he was a very fine craftsman and used reputable well trained cabinetmakers.
DIAL PAINTER WILLIAM JONES:
It now seems that William Jones might have been born in or around Philadelphia and before 1820 he moved in with an Englishman who was a dial painter, having been trained in England. We believe that this is the man who trained William. Early on the writing suggested that he was born in England, but that has been questioned in the past few years and although not finely settled it appears that he was an American trained in the English technique by a man he shared a room with in Philadelphia. Starting in 1822 William Jones established a prolific business in painting dials for American clocks and worked at that location for the next 20 years. There is no question that your painted iron dial was made by Wm Jones in Philadelphia. Most of his dials had Arabic numerals which were characteristic: The tops of his 2's contained parallel lines on their inner borders (note the 12 and the 2). Note the flair of his peaked 1’s. His 6 and 9 contained curls that overlapped the circular portion of the numbers. His 8's were called shotgun 8's because they looked as if one was looking at the barrel of a shotgun. The minute markers on the outside of the hour chapter ring were noted every 15 minutes. Note the 15 outside the 3 hour, the 30 outside the 6, the 45 outside the 9 and the 60 atop the hour 12. Earlier dial painters indicated the minutes every 5 minutes, not every 15 as Jones did. The use of acorns, flower baskets, shells and wheat in the corner spandrels was typical of his work and the color filled the majority of the spandrel. An aid in dating your dial and therefore your clock is found in the numeral 8. Roughly between 1822 and 1825 the top of the 8 was smaller in size than the bottom section. Between 1825 and 1835 The inside of the 8's appeared to be two equally sized rectangles, while post 1835 the inside of the 8's were very boxy squares of equal size.
By 1840, the need for dial painter in Philadelphia quickly disappeared as tall clocks gave way to the cheaper Connecticut mantel and wall clocks.
COMPARABLES:
~https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/91897110_charles-cooper-lebanon-pa-cherry-tall-case-clock (Looks like your clock was sold at auction in November 2020 for $2200. A very good buy even in today’s market)
~https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/91633695_a-federal-inlaid-cherrywood-tall-case-clock-charles (A Hepplewhite case made about 1808-1810 with a Curtiss and Nolen Boston dial, sold in 2020 for $3250 or $4062 with premium)
https://pookandpook.com/lot/charles-cooper-lebanon-pennsylvania-federal-in-3090489 (All the way back in 2009, Pook & Pook sold this clock with a “Spurious” signature for $8775. That is not noted on the website but seen on live auctioneers.)
PRICING:
Even two years ago I would have priced such a clock close to or in the five figure range, but times have been quickly changing for Pennsylvania tall clocks in general and later (post 1810) Pennsylvania clocks in particular. The pandemic has produced less willing and less able buyers at virtual auctions, etc. many factors have caused the tumbling of prices, something which was happening for years prior to the pandemic as well. The presence of a more highly carved case with fine form, and with evidence of a family provenance and an early or original surface finish would place a Charles Cooper clock in the $10K-$12K range today. The castle top has never sold as well as the classical broken arch pediment.
I find the cherrywood case of your example, albeit refinished, in fine shape and the line, proportion and form of the clock impresses me, although I feel that bun feet generally brings less interest at auction. I do believe you got a fine buy when you purchased this clock, and I do think that it has a fair market value today that would place it in the range of $5000-$6000 at the right auction house with less threat of this pandemic. So, the bottom line, in my mind is that if we all survive to get through to better times and can congregate again, and the economy improves (and it will), I expect the value of your example to only increase with time.
I have thrown a lot of information your way today, but read it slowly and there are lots of facts to learn about your example.
The only thing I would consider doing to this clock is stabilizing the moon dial, which a professional dial painter can do for you. Do not repaint the moon dial, do not strength the dial in any way except to simply prevent the revolving dial from further flaking. Please forgive any grammatical or typographical errors.
Thank you for choosing mearto.com
Have a Happy New Year.
My best,
David