Mr. Cox's Perpetual Motion, A Prize in the Museum Lottery

Cox’s Museum

Cox's Museum officially opened in February 1772 and closed in December of the same year, though Cox exhibited his work informally prior to its opening and continued to display his lottery exhibitions in its space until the 1775 drawing (Pointon 425). Despite its brief life, normal for London “shows” of the period, the museum was hugely successful and the subject of much contemporary commentary as well as subsequent historical studies. The museum’s emphasis was almost entirely jeweled automata and clockwork. Pointon describes the setting of the museum:

The Museum was illuminated by candles in candelabra and girandoles suspended from dragons’ mouths . . . Admission was half a guinea, which, according to a letter (probably written by Cox himself) in the Public Ledger . . . was the same as entry to the Pantheon, to Fischer’s benefit concerts, and to "hear Signiora [sic] Sirmen sing." (Pointon 431-32, Pointon’s brackets)

Clearly, Cox marketed his museum as an artistic experience on par with other major “shows” and cultural venues, an extension of “the gradual encreased [sic] of taste and elegance, within these last twenty years, in this metropolis” (qtd. in Pointon 433). However, he also offered a reduced admission fee during certain hours, thereby enlarging his potential audience and customers.

Whether or not visitors registered their experience at the Museum as on par with that of the Pantheon (and Fanny Burney’s character Evelina clearly does not), the spectacle was very successful. In June of 1772, for example, the Museum was estimated to have had roughly a thousand visitors each week (Smith 358). Some of the more fantastic automata included:

variant compositions of an elephant and howdah; a temple with palm trees and crocodiles; a flute-playing Chinese boy; an aviary with fountains and bells; and a pair of gardeners' boys with musical pineapples. The basic compositions were further enriched by jeweled flowers, animals, clocks and chimes. (Le Corbeiller 352)

These descriptions also make apparent the Orientalist element of Cox’s Museum. Cox publicized his museum along with his intention to sell these items in East Asia (whether true or not), though very few of them were marketed abroad. (Pointon gives an especially rich reading of the Orientalist economics of Cox’s automata.) Cox stopped exhibiting, though not dealing in, automata after the lottery; however, the Cox Museum spawned several subsequent shows, including Merlin’s Mechanical Museum and Weeks’s Museum.

The significance of this engraving lies mainly in its association with Cox’s Lottery and Cox’s Museum, as well as with the importance of luxury clocks to Romantic culture and aesthetics, mercantilism, and imperial commerce. Luxury clocks were closely linked with the production of automata during the latter half of the eighteenth century due to both new advancements in horological technology and a growing luxury trade market. As Pointon notes, luxury trade with China had been established in the late sixteenth century through diplomatic rituals of gift-giving, especially of clocks, and was greatly expanded in the eighteenth century through the commercial exploits of the East India Company (443-45). Automata in this period were thus associated with and often visually coded as “oriental”—observable in the prevalence of Turkish and Chinese figures, elephants and other exotic animals, “sing-songs,” and references to Orientalist religions—but were also made in London (and Paris, and elsewhere) for export to China, where they were received as representative of European aesthetics (Pointon 443). Cox, whose objects seem constantly to be on their way to or from the East, thus becomes an important figure for understanding the complexity of imperial commerce and Orientalism in this period.

Mr. Cox's Perpetual Motion, A Prize in the Museum Library also makes clear the strong relationship between luxury clocks and automata in the late eighteenth century. It is significant, for example, that the perpetual motion clock was singled out for illustration in the lottery catalogue as one of Cox’s masterpieces, on par with elaborate automata such as the silver swan, which preened itself, glided along its glass “water,” and picked up and swallowed wriggling “fish” made of glass rods (Greater London Council 125). This relationship would, as this gallery argues, change in the early nineteenth century, as automata came to be associated less with luxury commodities and more with the public display of mechanical advancement and industry. Cox’s Museum, however, as one of the first public spectacles of automata and as a failed luxury commercial outlet, marks a transition between those two modes of the cultural consumption of automata.