Clocks

For most people in the eighteenth century, knowing the exact time was an unnecessary luxury. Farmers, craftsmen, and other working class individuals could rely on the sun to tell them that it was time to work. Sundials and hour glasses provided rudimentary tools to tell time. Clocks were present in French colonial Canada as early as the 1630s and were generally the property of religious communities. Metropolitan elites could demonstrate their piety through donations to missions and religious orders established in New France; a Monsieur de Bernières donated a clock to the Ursulines of Québec in the early 1650s. Clocks and watches were more often than not the purview of elites, whether bourgeois merchants or noblemen, including the governors and intendants of New France. The first public clock in Canada was installed by 1710 at the Sulpician seminary in Montréal.

Colonial craftsmen in Montréal and Québec were called upon to create and repair timepieces including clocks and pocket watches by the eighteenth century. The Swedish visitor Pehr Kalm noted that they were surpassed by those working in British colonial settlements such as Philadelphia and New York when he visited New France in 1749. Henri Solo or Solon is the first horloger, or clockmaker, mentioned in colonial archives. He worked in Québec beginning in the mid-1720s.  Jean-Baptiste Filiau, also known as Dubois, and François Valin are the only other French colonial horlogers mentioned before 1760.

This early eighteenth-century clock was long believed to have been given as a gift to Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais upon her marriage to François-Madeleine d’Youville. The couple were wed at the church of Notre-Dame in Montréal in 1722. Discrete brass mounts ornament the clock case's palisander wood veneer surface. The copper clock face presents an ornamental relief, and the iron hands point to porcelain numbers.

The clock is attributed to Antoine Palanson, a Lorraine-born Parisian horlogeur. His signature appears below the clock face. Palanson completed his apprenticeship in the early 1740s which, combined with his 1718 birth, debunks the legend of the clock's earliest origins in colonial Canada. However, it has survived in the same Montréal collection since the eighteenth century, strengthening the supposition that it was owned by Madame d'Youville at one point.

The more extravagant model seen here is now owned by the Canadian Museum of History. It was acquired with a history of ownership in the Longueuil family. Charles III Le Moyne, baron de Longueuil, is said to have received this clock as a gift from Louis XV. It has also survived with its matching bracket, indicating its placement upon a wall, perhaps overlooking a commode.