Now that our remodeled Museum of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors (NAWCC) has been acclaimed as spectacular and has been viewed by thousands of our members, many of you will be eager to check out other museum collections. You will be interested in a press release from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute (MWPAI) in Utica, NY, that announces that an exhibition of one hundred of their most visually appealing European and American watches, dating from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, is to open April 29th and run through October 7, 2001. The watches are drawn from a collection of 289 watches and table clocks by Thomas and Frederick Proctor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with color illustrations and descriptions of the most important watches, an illustrated checklist and relevant documentation of the entire collection. After showing at MWPAI, beginning October 2001, the exhibition will tour nationally and internationally before returning to its home in Utica. MWPAI has recently constructed a suite of galleries to display it.

The Proctor Collection

I was commissioned by MWPAI to do research on other watch collections of the same period as the Proctors’ and their present whereabouts. I have been given permission by MWPAI to share my research with you. I found out quickly that MWPAI is unusual, because its complete collection is still intact and housed at its original site. It is large, personal, and gives insight into a period of passionate collecting in America. There have been no additions or deletions to the watch collection since the death of Maria Proctor, one of the founders of MWPAI, in 1935.

The Institute’s booklet, Watches: The Proctor Collection,¹ published in 1988, gives the details of the lives and collecting history of two brothers, Thomas Redfield Proctor (1844-1920) and Frederick Towne Proctor (1856-1929), who were married to two sisters and lived in side by side houses. One book from the early twentieth century called them among the foremost watch collectors in the United States at that time. The Institute itself is partly housed in the original 1850 Italianate mansion home of one of the brothers, Fountain Elms, along with an International-style gallery designed by Philip Johnson in the 1950s. The watch collection is displayed among the things the collectors lived with and the furniture and works of art they also collected. It was originally displayed at MWPAI from 1935 to 1958, when, because of the construction and renovation, it was moved to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., on a long-term loan basis. Some watches were displayed at the nearby Naval Observatory. The whole collection returned to Utica in 1988.

Who were some of the other American late nineteenth and early twentieth century collectors of watches and clocks? Where are their collections now? The truth is, very few other early watch collections are now intact or on view to the public with the owners’ names attached. Besides the Proctor Collection in its original home, groups of clocks and watches from individual collectors have been left to museums and galleries. Many museums, including the extensive one belonging to NAWCC, do not group such collections together, although they are sometimes displayed with the original owner’s name.

The Taft Museum of Art

There is one collection that competes strongly with MWPAI. This is housed in the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati. The building is the original home of Charles Phelps and Anna Sinton Taft and of their collection.^2,3,4 The Palladian-style house was built around 1820 and was later acquired by the Sinton family. Anna Sinton married Charles Phelps Taft in the house in 1873. Charles Phelps Taft was the older half-brother of President William Howard Taft. The married couple collected with the passion of wealthy Americans in the last half of the nineteenth century. In 1900 Anna Taft inherited the house and she and her husband began filling it with their collections. In 1905, in a single purchase, through the Parisian dealer Jacques Seligmann, they bought the entire watch collection of Ivan Eduardo, eleventh count of Gramedo, and his wife Ethel Brown of Chicago. This enormous collection was of seventeenth and eighteenth century enameled watches and this one-time purchase showed a love of enamels rather than of watches per se. The house and its collections were bequeathed to the people of Cincinnati in 1927 and the Taft Museum opened to the public in 1932. The collections are displayed in their original surroundings. The watches have been placed together in an auxiliary gallery called the Keystone Gallery, which also houses other decorative arts. Changing exhibitions focus on different aspects of the watch collection. A magnificent catalog with an article by Jonathan W. Snellenburg is available.

The Henry Ford Museum

Among the great one-man collections at its original site is that of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, which touches on virtually every aspect of horology.⁵ Henry Ford (1863-1947) started life as a watchmaker and never lost his love for clocks and watches, even though he is usually identified with his automobiles. He created the museum so that people could learn how things worked and how they were made and opened it to the public on October 21, 1929, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb. The pocket watch collection is in this huge, one-floor museum. Throughout the village various installations show watch and clock shops, sundials, tower clocks, and aspects of watchmaking. This is a true delight, although “intimate” is not a word one could apply to this vast spread.

The Frick Collection

The Henry Clay Frick Collection in New York includes a small number of clocks. Frick was an industrialist, collector, and philanthropist who was associated with the Carnegie Brothers and U.S. Steel. He built his mansion in 1914 as a residence. He died in 1919 and in 1920 his house and collections were bequeathed to the City of New York. His small and choice horological collection consisted of only three French clocks, still prominently displayed.

(The Henry Clay Frick Collection has recently been enriched at the bequest of Winthrop Edey with his collection of early seventeenth and eighteenth century clocks.)

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