28.                  $500

E. W. Adams Patent Eight Day Brass Clock, 1836–1837.  Adams worked with Chauncey Marshall in Seneca Falls, NY from 1834 to 1836, when he bought out Marshall.  Adams went broke the next year and moved to Chillicothe OH.  This magnificent Empire case is just under 40 inches tall with mahogany veneer, burled mahogany on the columns with gold-painted capitals and plinths, and four glasses, all original, with a crack in the bottom tablet.  The topmost glass eagle image is likely original, the middle tablet must have been repainted but is exactly like ones found in several other examples, and the lower tablet shows the draperies and columns favored by New York clockmakers; this pattern can also be seen in several other examples – search LiveAuctioneers for E.W. Adams.  The wooden dial is clean and bright with some well-done fill-in across the middle; the hands are probably not original and may be later.  The brass 8-day, time-and-strike movement is unique to Adams, with an unusually positioned strike count wheel.  It is driven by two old 8-day weights, running and striking like a champ.  Adam’s penchant for placing a lithograph on the back wall for viewing through the draperies is exhibited here with a black & white drawing titled “The Young Cavalier”, showing a young girl on the back of a St. Bernard dog.  This would appear to be a play on a popular contemporary Nathanial Currier lithograph of a girl wearing a cavalier’s hat and drawing a sword from her belt.  His maker’s label is pasted above it, and there also appears to have been a second lithograph applied but now most of it is removed.  The most recent sale of a similar clock was at Forsythe’s Auctions in 2021 for $550.  $500–$750.