James Cox (watchmaker)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James Cox (* around 1723 ; † early 1800 ) was an English watchmaker, jeweler and entrepreneur from London. Among other things, he traded in elaborate clockworks and automatons designed as decorative pieces , which he had produced in London and Geneva and exported mainly to China .

Life

The oldest evidence of Cox's entrepreneurial activity is the establishment of a branch at Racquet Court on Fleet Street in 1749. From 1757 to 1795 he or his company James Cox & Son had a branch at 103 Shoe Lane, also on the Fleet Street. James Cox not only produced his clockworks and automata himself in London, but also traded in the works of well-known Swiss watchmakers from Geneva such as Pierre Jaquet-Droz and Jean-Frédéric Leschot and placed commissions there. According to his own statements, he employed around 800 to 1000 workers at the beginning of the 1770s. In 1769 he also acquired the Chelsea Porcelain Factory , one of the most important English porcelain manufacturers , from Nicholas Sprimont , which he sold again after five months. In order to raise the profile of his clockworks and automatons and to generate greater demand, Cox opened the Spring Gardens Museum at Charing Cross in 1772 , in which he exhibited a selection of his best creations. However, the museum itself was not a financial success, so he closed it again in 1774 and then sold the exhibits through a lottery for which he had received permission from parliament. Approximately 120,000 lots were sold for the 56 exhibits, the proceeds of which were approximately £ 197,500 . Despite the initially successful exports to India and China, Cox later got into financial difficulties and had to declare bankruptcy for the second time in November 1778.

The Peacock Clock in the Hermitage

In the 1760s, Cox began exporting to India and China, but exports had to go through the British East India Company , which at the time had a monopoly of trade with China and India. Many details of these exports are not known, but it is certain that in 1766 Cox made two automata as a present for the Emperor Qianlong on behalf of the East India Company . His creations were very popular at the Chinese imperial court. The St. James Chronicle reported in 1772 that the Emperor Qianlong bought up a full shipload of Cox's produce while turning away ships from other traders. According to a report from 1773, by that time Cox had sold clockworks and automata worth over £ 500,000 abroad. However, when the British government banned the export of luxury goods to China in 1772, Cox lost its main export market. It is believed that he founded the Spring Gardens Museum in order to find a use for his automatons, which were originally intended for export. After his bankruptcy in 1778, his son John Henry traveled to Guangzhou in the early 1780s to set up a subsidiary there and produce locally for the Chinese market. John Henry had initially received permission from the East India Company to work as a freelance trader in China for three years. He then came into conflict with her, presumably because he tried to take part in the cotton and opium trade with two ships of his own. The East India Company then forced him to leave Guangzhou. John Henry circumvented the East India Company's monopoly by officially operating under the flags of other countries. After he was in the meantime with the support of the Swedish King Gustaf III. had been active in the North American fur trade, he returned to Guangzhou in 1791 on behalf of Prussia. In 1788, however, James Cox & Son ran into financial difficulties again; Henry Cox had Daniel Beale (1759–1827) involved in the establishment a year earlier. This then changed names and owners several times in the following period. The London branch, on the other hand, operated under the name James Cox & Son until 1795 .

Little is known about the last years of Cox's life. His son John Henry died in Guangzhou in late 1791, and his only daughter Elizabeth died in the fall of 1792 at the age of 32. In 1797 the last shop of his company closed in Shoe Lane and Cox died a few years later, presumably in February 1800 in Watford , where he owned a small country house. It is certain that his body was transferred from Watford to London on February 26, 1800, to be buried in the family grave in Bunhill Fields . There is also an anecdote from the last years of his life. According to her, Cox acquired Oliver Cromwell's embalmed head in 1787 and sold it over a decade later in 1799 for £ 230 to pay off personal debts.

Work and reception

The Silver Swan at the Bowes Museum

Cox clockworks and automata are now in the collections of internationally renowned museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York , the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg , the Zhongbiao Guan (Clock Hall) in the Forbidden City in Beijing , the Bowes Museum in Northern England and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. By far the largest number of exhibits is owned by the museums of the Forbidden City, while the two most famous unique pieces, the silver swan (Bowes Museum) and the peacock clock (Hermitage) can be found in Europe. The silver swan is an automaton driven by three clockworks that depicts the movements of a swimming swan. The peacock clock is an automaton adorned with gold and jewels, which features three mechanized birds: a peacock, a rooster and an owl. Katharina the Great probably received the peacock clock as a gift from Potjomkin in 1781 .

Around 1760, Cox developed one of the first atmospheric clocks together with Jean-Joseph Merlin , who also developed the mechanics for some of Cox's automatons . These use fluctuations in air pressure to wind their movements automatically. This creates the impression of a supposed perpetual motion machine and Cox himself named his watch The Perpetual Motion . It originally contained 68 kilograms of mercury to record changes in air pressure. Today it is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In December 2012 the Bonhams auction house auctioned a watch by Cox, which was now in the possession of the Egyptian King Faruq , for 385,250 pounds sterling .

The writer Christoph Ransmayr was inspired by Cox and his Perpetual Motion to write the novel Cox or Der Lauf der Zeit (2016), in which the British watchmaker Alister Cox traveled to China in the 18th century to find an "eternal" for Emperor Qianlong Clock "to build.

literature

  • Catherine Pagani: "Eastern magnificence & European ingenuity": Clocks of Late Imperial China . University of Michigan Press, 2001, ISBN 0-472-11208-2 , pp. 100-112 ( excerpt (Google) )
  • Ingrid Schuster: Fascination East Asia: On the cultural interaction Europe - Japan - China: essays from three decades . Peter Lang, 2007, ISBN 978-3-03911-260-9 , pp. 189–192 ( excerpt (Google) )
  • Shannon Venable: Gold: A Cultural Encyclopedia . ABC-CLIO, 2011, ISBN 978-0-313-38430-1 , pp. 75-77 ( excerpt (Google) )
  • Marcia Pointon : Dealer in Magic: James Cox's Jewelry Museum and the Economics of Luxury Spectacle in Late 18th Century London . In: Neil De Marchi, Craufurd DW Goodwin: Econonimcs Engagements with Art. Duke University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8223-2489-X , pp. 423–449 ( online copy ; PDF; 276 kB)
  • Clare Le Corbeiller: James Cox: A Biographical Review. In: Burlington Magazine. 112 (1970), pp. 351-58 ( JSTOR 876334 , JSTOR corrections )
  • Roger Smith: James Cox (c. 1723-1800): A Revised Biography. In: Burlington Magazine. 142 (June 2000), pp. 353-61 ( JSTOR 888937 )

Web links

Commons : James Cox  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e Catherine Pagani: "Eastern magnificence & European ingenuity": Clocks of Late Imperial China . University of Michigan Press, 2001, ISBN 0-472-11208-2 , pp. 100-112. ( Excerpt in the Google book search)
  2. ^ A b c Clare Vincent, JH Leopold: James Cox (approx. 1723-1800): Goldsmith and Entrepreneur. In: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/jcox/hd_jcox.htm (November 2008)
  3. ^ A b Shannon Venable: Gold: A Cultural Encyclopedia . ABC-CLIO, 2011, ISBN 978-0-313-38430-1 , pp. 75-77. ( Excerpt in the Google book search)
  4. ^ Clare Le Corbeiller: Cox and his Curious Toys . Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin.
  5. ^ Roger Smith: James Cox (c. 1723-1800): A Revised Biography. In: Burlington Magazine. 142 (June 2000), pp. 353-61 ( JSTOR 888937 )
  6. ↑ Damian Harper, David Eimer: Beijing . Lonely Planet, 2010, ISBN 978-1-74104-877-3 , p. 66. ( Excerpt in the Google book search)
  7. ↑ Yuna Zek, Antonina Balina, Mikhail Guryev, Yuri Semionov: The Peacock Clock ( Memento from February 2, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) - photos, history and description of the peacock clock on hermitagemuseum.org (website of the Hermitage , originally accessed February 16, 2012 )
  8. ^ Arthur WJG Ord-Hume: Perpetual Motion: The History of an Obsession . 1977, reprinted: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2006, ISBN 1-931882-51-7 , pp. 110-124. ( Excerpt in the Google book search)
  9. ↑ MUSICAL CLOCK ONCE OWNED BY EGYPT'S KING FAROUK SELLS FOR £ 385,250 AT BONHAMS £ 1.5M FINE CLOCK SALE IN LONDOn . Bonhams' Press Release, 2012-12-12
  10. ↑ Ijoma Mangold: Time becomes a novel here . Die Zeit, No. 47/2016, November 10, 2016
  11. ↑ Gisa Funk: Parable about art and power . Deutschlandfunk, November 20, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Cox, James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English watchmaker
DATE OF BIRTH around 1723
DATE OF DEATH 1800