Father Time tall case clock

Elise Weyerhaeuser of St. Paul surprised her father, Frederick, with this tall case clock on his seventieth birthday, in 1904. She had found it in New York at Tiffany & Co., one of the outstanding purveyors of decorative arts in America. The elaborate case has mythological and nautical motifs: winged dragons at the top, carvings of Father Time next to the clockface, female figures resembling ship’s figureheads near the chimes, and, at the bottom, griffins (mythical lion-eagle hybrids) flanking a ship at sea. Though made in the early 1900s, its Renaissance Revival style, with heavy carved figures, scrolls, and foliage, was in vogue in the previous century and would have appealed to a man like Mr. Weyerhaeuser, whose tastes had formed in the 1800s.