David Lestourgeon, London

• gilt full plate movement, verge escapement, large pierced balance cock engraved with the Royal Arms of Queen Anne, fusee and chain, Egyptian pillars • the dial with embossed figure of Chronos drawing Helios's chariot, semi-circular silver chapter ring for minutes to the upper edge of the dial, similar smaller semi-circular ring for the quarters beneath, in between a gilt-metal rotating disc carrying an aperture for the hours which rises like the sun and travels to the right, indicating hours, quarter hours and minutes, disappearing to be replaced by the next hour, plain inner case and outer case with square hinge, inner case with maker's mark PW • movement signed L'esturgeon London 1331

Sotheby's London, The Charles Kalish Collection, 13th July 1964, lot 20

Terence Camerer Cuss, The English Watch 1585-1970, p. 145, pl. 75

The balance cock of this watch is engraved with the Royal Arms adopted by Queen Anne after the Act of Union in 1707. Interestingly, another watch by David Lestourgeon, which dates to circa 1702, formerly in the Pierpont Morgan Collection, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY features a portrait of Anne's predecessor, King William III to the back-plate. The incorporation of these loyal Royal references may well represent a sense of national pride, celebrating the Union, and a new hope and optimism for the coming century, after the considerable social and political upheavals of the 17th century.  

Makers at the end of the 17th century were by no means wedded to the standard dial configuration of concentric hour and minute hands, which had become more universal.  As a result, some unusual dial designs were devised particularly by English watchmakers. During this period there were four principal variations of dial design: the six-hour dial, the wandering hour dial, the differential dial and the sun-and-moon dial.

In Watches, by Cecil Clutton and George Daniels, p.77, First Edition, 1965, the Authors write: “a peculiarity of the wandering hour watches is that nearly, if not quite all, surviving English specimens have a royal attribution, such as a royal portrait (James II, Mary, or Anne; no Charles II is known to the authors) on the dial; or the royal arms engraved on the cock; or both....These distinctions have never been explained, and are additionally mysterious since several makers produced the type, not all of whom held a royal appointment.  As one surviving example has the portrait of Queen Anne it is evident that what is, after all, a very sensible arrangement, continued in production well after the turn of the century."  For a detailed explanation of how the wandering hour dial works, Op. Cit. pp. 76-77.

David Lestourgeon was a Freeman of the Clockmakers' Company between 1698-1731.