This is likely to be the most complex and difficult job I will ever do.  This clock was missing a substantial portion of its base, having rotted away on damp floors over the centuries, as if this wasn’t bad enough it was covered in a complex pattern of marquetry called “Arabesque” which needed to be replaced in many areas as well as new work knitted seamlessly into existing tissue thin 300 year old marquetry. Yikes.  I put it off for two years but eventually got started at the urging of the owner, a respected cabinet maker in his own right who helpfully redrew the missing patterns.

 

I sometimes think of restoration as being like the old Ginger Rogers quote about doing everything Fed Astaire did while doing it backwards in high heels, me being Ginger Roger’s in this scenario (apologies for that mental image) and cabinet makers being Astaire. Moreover, you have to make it look as if you haven’t done anything to it. 

 

First was to rebuild the substrate carcase and recreate the hand-cut walnut veneer as well as rebuild from scratch the entire missing top of the hood. Once these were complete I spent time aging up the base and the new work, this is necessary because it’s immensely distracting if the base looks brand new and the case has 300 years of wear. 

 

Next was the marquetry.  This is created by layering up veneer into a kind of sandwich then cutting the pattern by hand then carefully unpicking the pattern and piecing it together like a jigsaw puzzle.  In this way you actually end up with a negative image of your design, I still have these negative off-cuts in a box somewhere.  The most difficult part was integrating the new work into the existing thin delicate original wood.  Any sensible person would have dispensed with the entire portion of this design altogether but, I am nothing if not bloody-minded, so I married up the new and old work, something I feel is akin to when surgeons reattach someone’s arm felt. 

 

Then more aging polishing – integrating new shellac with the original finish which was fine in many parts – waxing and then capping it off with some truly magnificent finals on the hood from the UK.

 

It always amazes me the long interesting lives these objects can lead and this clock is good example of that. The clock mechanism was made by a Dutchman called Johann Higginson living in London, 240 years it was hidden from the Nazi’s in a cave in the Channel Islands before being inherited and brought to NZ.  It was then bought by an American living in Whanganui, the case restored by me in Auckland, the works by master Clockmaker Bruce Aitken in Christchurch, thence it disappeared to the USA with the owner and now resides in Guanajuato Mexico.