THE DIAL SIGNED BY DAVID RITTENHOUSE, PROBABLY DAVID RITTENHOUSE (1732-1796), PHILADELPHIA, LATE 18TH CENTURY

"As an artist he has exhibited a great proof of mechanical genius as the world has ever produced" was just a one of the accolades that future President Thomas Jefferson bestowed upon David Rittenhouse (1732-1796). Renowned during his day and today, Rittenhouse stands as eighteenth-century America's most important clockmaker, astronomer and land surveyor and with his development of the Vernier compass in the early 1780s, invented the first American contribution to the field of mathematical instruments. Politically active in Philadelphia, Rittenhouse befriended statesmen and future Presidents, including Jefferson, George Washington, for whom he made two surveyor's compasses in 1782 and Benjamin Franklin, whom he succeeded as President of the American Philosophical Society. Less than a dozen compasses bearing his name survive and some marked David (or D.) Rittenhouse may have been made by the famed maker's nephew of the same name (see Skinner, 29 July 2006, lot 94). As the latter is thought to have trained under his father and the elder David's brother, Benjamin Rittenhouse (1740-1825), the work of the younger David is presumed to resemble Benjamin's style. As seen in lots 24 and 26 in this sale, Benjamin's engraved designs feature similarly decorated 8-point compass stars; however, the segments pointing to the half-cardinal points on the compass offered here are less florid than those on Benjamin's work and more closely resemble the elder David's work, including a compass at the Smithsonian thought to have been made for Washington (Smithsonian, National Museum of American History, acc. nos. PL*092538 and 1983.0498.01). For more on Rittenhouse, see Martha H. Willoughby, biographies, Timeless: American Masterpiece Brass Dial Clocks, Frank Hohmann III, ed. (New York, 2009), pp. 349-352.