Watch

Edward East

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Trained as a goldsmith, Edward East was a founding member of the London Clockmakers' Company in 1631. A successful maker of both clocks and watches throughout the Commonwealth period, he remained a royalist and was appointed clockmaker in 1660 to the newly restored King Charles II (1630–1685). The plain, almost egg-shaped watch known as a Puritan watch is commonly thought to have been developed in England in reaction to the elaborately decorated watchcases of the earlier seventeenth century. Watches of the same variety, however, are known to have been made in the Dutch cities of Haarlem and The Hague from about 1625. This elegant example has a worm-and-wheel set-up for the mainspring, a pinned-on cock with a beautifully executed openwork floral design, elegant pillars of a type known as Egyptian, and a gut fusee. It has a duration of sixteen hours.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art