Donnington Priory Salerooms

42
A rare Dutch gold oval ‘Puritan’ watch with
calendar
Jan Jansse Boekels the younger, The Hague,
circa 1635
The gilt single fusee verge movement with four
pierced Egyptian pillars, four-wheel train and later
solid escapewheel, the backplate with elaborate
foliate pieced balance and ratchet spring set up
cocks and signed Jan Jans’ Boekels, Hage, the
gold Roman numeral dial with stylised T-shaped
half hour markers, inner quarter hour track,
calendar aperture at XII o’clock and original
shaped steel hand, the solid gold two-piece
case with oval dial aperture (glass lacking) and
turned post for the suspension loop, the rear
with winding hole (lacking shutter), the case 3cm
high (excluding suspension loop and post),
2.5cm wide.
John Leopold gives an interesting but brief
account of the life and work of Jan Jansse
Boekels in his article Clockmaking in Britain
and the Netherlands (published in NOTES &
RECORDS of THE ROYAL SOCIETY, London
1989 page156);- “The earliest certain instance of
a Dutch-trained maker going to London dates
from around 1626. It concerns one Jacob
Cornelisse van Casbeeck, born ca. 1601, who
had since about 1621 been an apprentice of the
Haarlem maker Jan Jansse II Boekels. This van
Casbeeck appears to have had an affair with his
master’s wife Saertgen Adriaens, and in 1625 a
disreputable fight brought loose, in which the wife
accused Boekels of all sorts of behaviour (including incest) and managed to get him imprisoned. Boekels was able to
clear himself, but no doubt a lot of damage had been done to his reputation and so he went to live in The Hague, thus
becoming the first watchmaker to work there. The wife finelly ran off with van Casbeeck to London, where they lived as
man and wife and as such had a daughter baptised in 1628. This fact enabled Boekels to get a divorce in 1632; he died
circa 1650. This sordid story would be unimportant but for the fact that Boekels was the foremost watchmaker of
Haarlem, if not the country, he seems to have been the first to produce small, oval watches of a simple rounded shape
commonly known as puritan-watches. One such watch made by Boekels while still in Haarlem, and therefore dating
before 1626, survives...” This watch can be compared to a related example described by Thompson, David
JAN JANSSEN BOCKELTS THE YOUNGER ‘PURITAN’ STYLE VERGE WATCH WITH CENTRE SECONDS, HAARLEM,
c. 1630, ‘’ANTIQUARIAN HOROLOGY’ Vol XXIX, December 2006 pages 827-30.
£3,000-5,000
01635 553553
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