The wonders of 18th-century automata

At the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, Mark Twain was mesmerised by a life-sized silver swan with ‘a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes… swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop’.

The jeweller’s shop this mechanical marvel had been born in 100 years earlier was Cox’s Jewelry Museum in London, but its mechanism of 700 components powered by three clockwork motors was the invention of Belgian-born horologist John Joseph Merlin (1735-1803), aka ‘the Ingenious Mechanic’.

Turning its head on its flexible neck and dipping its beak to catch a fish in a glittering pool of rotating glass rods – all to musical accompaniment – the swan was the talking point of the Paris exhibition, where it also caught the eye of John Bowes and his French wife Joséphine, on the lookout for objets d’art for the museum they planned to open in their château then under construction in Barnard Castle. As the £2,000 price tag far exceeded the £10 acquisitions limit the couple had set themselves, they resisted temptation, but five years later they picked the swan up for a song – at £200, still the biggest ticket item in their collection.

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 Forget the El Greco, the Goya and the Canalettos: since the Bowes Museum’s opening in 1892 the Silver Swan has been its leading attraction, drawing spellbound visitors to its afternoon performances. But during Covid, like so much else, it ground to a halt and it now sits languishing in its dedicated gallery while the Bowes raises the £200,000 needed for repairs. In the meantime, the museum is marking 250 years since the swan’s debut at Cox’s Museum with an exhibition celebrating the delights of automata.