One of a Kind German Castle Clock
Size: 10 feet tall
Time/StrikeAntique- A true collector's piece!
King Frederick III commissioned this elaborate ten-foot tall French Rococo style grandfather clock between 1871 and 1875. It was kept in the Schloss San Souci (summer palace, meaning palace without care) located in Potsdam, 17 miles southwest of Berlin, Germany.
King Frederick III was married to Princess Royal Victoria, the oldest daughter of England's Queen Victoria. The faces on the clock are said to represent Princess Victoria. Most royal marriages are performed for political reasons, but their marriage was a wonderful love story. They met when Victoria was just ten years old. Frederick told Queen Victoria he wanted to marry her daughter and she asked him to wait till young Victoria gew up. He asked her hand when she was 14. They married in 1847 when Victoria was 17 and he was 26, and were married for 31 years. He became king when his father died at the age of 91 in 1888. Frederick reigned only 99 days before he died of throat cancer.
The clock was made by LFS Lorenz Furtwanglar & Son in Germany near Stuttgart. They were known to make elaborate grandfather clocks. Just after the ware with France in 1871, money was so abundant that people didn't know what to do with it. The clock was commissioned around this same time.
During WWII when the Russians were approaching and stripping the land of fine art pieces, two antique dealers dismantled the clock and hit it in the basement. Later an American Colonel bough the clock and brought it home to Oregon at the end of the war. The Schloss Cecilienhof, now a first class hotel and musum, is built on the same palace grounds as the Schloss San Souci. This is where the Potsdam Conference was held in 1945 to decide the post war fate of Germany by Truman, Stalin and Churchill.