A French Portico clock

Price : $2,195.00

A French Portico clock, having four Jacobean twist columns with brass mounts.  the ebonised case has marquetry inlay, the eight day movement strikes on a bell and is stamped Japy Freres.

Complete with pendulum and suitable key.  Fully serviced and all in superb condition.

Frederic Japy was born in 1749 in Beaumont, France in the Franche-Comte region. This area is in eastern France and has Alsace to the north, Burgundy to the west, and has a long, 143-mile border with Switzerland. Japy was long interested in the clock-making industry in the Jura Mountains, and he began his career apprenticed to a Swiss clock maker. Eventually, he moved on to work with the inventor Jean-Jacques Jeanneret-Gris. It was this latter relationship that allowed Japy to invent his own machine tools, which over the years led to the mechanization of the clock-making industry in France.

Japy established the first factory to make rough watch movements in Beaumont in 1777. By 1780 he had more than 2,000 patterns and by 1806, that number had grown to almost 13,000. In 1806 he established Japy Freres with his three sons who continued to run the business after their father’s death in 1812.