“This eight-day clock hangs in a case of rich, swirling mahogany, with a fiery blaze on the base. It is crowned by a cockerel, a double entendre for the chimes of the clock and Saint Peter, the patron saint of clocks (who denied Christ three times before the cock crowed). The case is identical to one bearing the label of George Pickering, a Philadelphia cabinetmaker whose work is little known but deserves to be better recognized and celebrated. The dial is an early example with painted enamel decoration, as painted dials did not eclipse silvered dials with regularity in North America until the late 1780s.

The lunette features two ships that move from side to side across the sea, a fitting image to honor the prosperous shipbuilding business of the clock’s original owners, Scottish émigré Jehu Eyre (1738– 1781), a heralded colonel in the Revolutionary War, and his wife, Lydia Wright Eyre (1744–1815). Eyre was the mastermind of the surprise Christmas Eve Delaware River attack on the British Army by George Washington’s Continental Army. Both strategically and in apparent retaliation,the British burned Eyre’s Kensington-area shipbuilding yards as soon as they entered Philadelphia in 1777.

Consisting of a timepiece, a dial, and a case, tall case clocks required the skills of several artisans. The German immigrant clockmaker Frederick Dominick made this clock’s movement, his 29th (as recorded on the dial). Dominick was in Philadelphia by 1766 with his father, Casper, a distiller, and brothers Henry and David. Soon after his father’s death in April 1768, Frederick announced that he made and repaired “all kinds of clocks and watches” and called on his fellow German countrymen to patronize him. Although Dominick’s brother David was a glazier and painter, the dial’s similarity to others on clocks not made by Dominick but housed in cases made by Pickering point to the painter John Winter. Winter lived and worked with Pickering and chose the merchant John Thomson, the whitesmith William Shannon, and Pickering as the executors of his estate. Winter first advertised from the shop of the merchant and upholsterer Plunkett Fleeson (1712–1791) in 1740, announcing himself as a “Painter, from London [who does] Landskip and Coach-Painting, Coats of Arms, Signs, Shewboards, Gilding, Writing in Gold or common Colours and Ornaments of all Kinds.” Beginning in late 1771 Winter had added to his skills the copying of Old Master portraits, the varnishing and mending of pictures, and “painting the inside of houses to represent stucco, fret or carved work.”

Pickering’s training as a cabinet and chair maker is unknown, but he indentured at least two apprentices, Thomas Heber in 1771 and William Hines in 1772. He dissolved a cabinetmaking partnership with Thomas Bryan in 1775 and afterward maintained his own shop on Water Street between Race and Vine Streets. Pickering died while still actively making furniture: the inventory of his shop taken at his death lists vast numbers and varieties of cabinetmaking and carving tools, including planes, gouges, chisels, and hollows and rounds; hundreds of feet of mahogany, walnut, and cedar plank; furniture parts ready to be assembled into completed commissions, such as pillars and tops for tea tables, chair feet, and clock cases; and “All the Patterns.”

Together Winter, Pickering, and Shannon possessed the skills to make and prepare the dial plate of Dominick’s movement, paint it, and fashion the mahogany case. The working relationship inferred here is supported by the fact that at least four other clocks have a case attributable to Pickering combined with a dial that appears to be by the same hand as this dial: one in the Delaware Historical Society, Wilmington (movement by Thomas Crow); one at Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia (movement by Frederick Maus); and two in a private collection, including one with a Pickering-labeled case made for a movement by Jacob Godshalk (1735–1781).
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