It is not often that a clock achieves the day's top price at an auction, but then a horologist's collection rarely comes up for sale. Last Wednesday, at Hamilton Osborne King's rooms in Blackrock, Dublin, an 18th century tortoiseshell gilt, bronze-mounted bracket clock by John Dean of London, formerly owned by the late Knollys Stokes, went for £13,000; it had carried a pre-sale estimate of only £4,000-£6,000.
Mr Stokes's keen interest in the Cork region was reflected by a pair of mid-19th century watercolour views of the vicinity of Cork city, and they also carried the same estimate but eventually went for £9,500. The next best figure of £7,500 was made by another timepiece, an English quarter repeating alarm bracket example from the early 18th century. A pair of early 19th century brass starting cannons by F. Swan of Dublin went for £5,200.
Other prices at this sale included: £4,800 for a Connemara landscape by Maurice Wilks; £4,400 for a mahogany bracket clock; £4,200 for a mahogany inlaid long-case clock, circa 1800 and signed George Williams, Bristol; and £3,500 for both Charles McAuley's Figures on a Road in the West of Ireland and Percy French's oil sketch of a mountain lake.
