58.              $500

E. W. Adams Patent Eight Day Brass Clock, 1836–1837.  Elmer Adams bought out Chauncey Marshall in 1836 (Adams was the clockmaker, Marshall the financier); Adams promptly went broke the next year in the crash of 1837 and to escape his creditors skedaddled to Chillicothe OH with some clocks, which he continued to sell through peddlers for several years.  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.  AAC sold this clock in 2023 for $825.  $500–$800.