- Tall Clock
- Eight-day Clock
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Nathan Howell is typical of most American clockmakers who, once they had completed a movement, left the matter of its housing to their client. Today five of Howell’s clocks are recorded and, not surprisingly, they are installed in a variety of cases. That of the Bayou Bend example has a distinctive boxed and scrolled pediment, probably patterned after an imported English model.
Related examples: Two unpublished clocks belong to the New Haven Colony Historical Society, one housed in a case that is clearly by the same cabinet shop that made the Bayou Bend case. Other examples include Antiques 93 (June 1968), p. 696; Maine Antique Digest, September 1986, p. 22-c. The maker of the Bayou Bend case also constructed one for an Isaac Doolittle, Sr., movement now in a private collection.
Book excerpt: Warren, David B., Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.
ProvenanceJack Friedman, by October 6, 1953; [Ginsburg & Levy, New York, October 6, 1953–May 24, 1960]; purchased by Miss Ima Hogg, 1960; given to MFAH, by 1966.
Exhibition History
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
Cataloguing data may change with further research.
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