Saving a stitch in time

July 20, 2009 - 9:39 AM by

One of the clocks on display at the Islamic Museum

One of the clocks on display at the Islamic Museum

I’ve never felt the need to own a watch – between cell phones, car clocks and sun dials, I’ve pretty much got it covered. But some people are more enamored with time – and time pieces. People like Sir David Lionel Salomons, a former mayor of London in the 1800s, who amassed one of the most valuable collection of ornate clocks and accessories in the world.

Sir David’s daughter, Vera Bryce Salomons, donated the collection to the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem in 1974, the same year, she endowed the museum with funds to enable it to open.

The clock collection, including over 55 clocks by influential 18th-century French clockmaker Abraham Louis Breguet, featured the ‘Marie Antoinette.’ Commissioned, according to legend, for the French queen by a lover, the clock was considered the crown jewel of Breguet’s career and the highlight of the Salamons exhibit.

The collection became so popular that the staid museum near the President’s residence in Talbieh became known as the ‘Clock Museum.’

All that changed on April 15, 1983, when the biggest robbery in Israel’s history at that time took place. Overnight, between the museum’s closing on Friday night and Shabbat morning, thieves pried open the bars on a small window, climbed into the building and drove away with over 100 items from the clock collection, including the Marie Antoinette; another priceless Breguet table clock from 1819 known as the ‘Sympathique,’ which ran on a system in which a watch placed in a recess of the clock was automatically set and reset; and an 11 cm.-long, gold “pistol clock” created at the beginning of the 19th century in France.

Ever since the burglary, not a word has been heard or sight seen of the missing priceless clocks. That’s what makes tonight reopening of the exhibit ‘The Mystery of Lost Time’ – with almost all of the clocks restored and returned to their home even more remarkable.

Read the whole story on your own time here.

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Tags: , , , • Category: Art, Crime, design, General, History and Culture 

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