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Lot Essay
James Cox's works made for export to the eighteenth-century courts of Russia, India and China are amongst the most distinctive of the George III period. Cox's workshop is first recorded in 1745 as located on Racquet Court, Fleet Street, from where he moved to Shoe Lane in Farringdon in 1756, having formed a partnership with Edward Grace. In the 1760's, he began to produce extravagant clocks, automata, necessaires and snuff-boxes, which made him fashionable in London circles and popular in the Far East and Russia (R. Smith, 'James Cox [c. 1723-1800]: a revised biography', Burlington Magazine, vol. CXLII, no. 1167, June 2000, p. 355). The present box epitomises Cox's style of this period in its use of hardstone panels mounted in gold cagework decorated with c-scrolls and foliage.
Joseph Martineau Senior, a Huguenot clock and watch maker, is listed as working in London, firstly in Orange Street and later St Martin's Court from 1744-1794, G. H. Baillie, Watchmakers and Clockmakers of the World, vol 1, p. 212. His watches are to be found in numerous museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Mathematisch Physikalischer Salon in Dresden.
Joseph Martineau Senior, a Huguenot clock and watch maker, is listed as working in London, firstly in Orange Street and later St Martin's Court from 1744-1794, G. H. Baillie, Watchmakers and Clockmakers of the World, vol 1, p. 212. His watches are to be found in numerous museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Mathematisch Physikalischer Salon in Dresden.