A jacquemart, sometimes anglicised as "jack" or written jaquemart, is a small articulated figure on the dial or case of a clock or watch that strikes the hours, quarters or minutes on a bell with a hammer or mallet. The term derives from the late medieval French personal name Jacquemart, applied originally to the bell-striking mechanical figures on public clock towers (the most-cited being the figure on the Notre-Dame de Dijon clock, installed in 1383 and still operating). The convention transferred to portable timepieces during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Use in horology

In wristwatch and pocket-watch terms, a jacquemart is a feature of a chiming watch — a minute repeater, hour repeater or quarter-striking watch — in which the chiming function is given visual expression by one or more small enamelled or sculpted figures that move to strike a bell or gong as the chime sounds. Two-figure jacquemarts striking alternately are typical, and three- and four-figure compositions appear in the more complex pieces.

Period of greatest production

The principal period of jacquemart watch production was the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with French, Swiss and English makers producing pocket watches with jacquemart automata for the European nobility and for export to the Ottoman, Chinese and Indian markets. Pieces by Piguet et Meylan, Frères Rochat and various Geneva houses are the most-cited examples; the Chinese-market trade in particular consumed large numbers of elaborate jacquemart-and-music-box pocket watches through the Canton trade.

Modern revival

The complication has been intermittently revived in modern haute horlogerie, with twenty-first-century jacquemart minute-repeaters produced by Ulysse Nardin (the Hannibal, Genghis Khan and other large-format pieces from 2003 onwards), Jaquet Droz, Vacheron Constantin and a small number of independent makers. The complication remains rare because of the cost and complexity of integrating reliable striking-figure automata with a chiming train.