Daniel Schepcke (d. 1775). The first watchmaker to the King to have special privileges (accorded on March 7, 1765), including complete independence from the Clockmaker?s Guild. His quarters, consisting of ?three small rooms and a kitchen?, were on the second floor of the King?s palace. His salary was 1000 tynfs per year and he was in addition paid for each watch or clock ordered by the King. The bills he presented to the King, as well as the palace inventories, show that he made clocks, watches, barometers and scientific instruments. The watches ordered by the King were given mostly as presents to foreign dignitaries and members of his court. One of the bills, dated July 1, 1777, was for a ?gold quarter repeater decorated with enamel?, and was for the fairly large sum of 65 ducats. It is tempting to speculate that the present watch is the one mentioned in the bill. Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, Stanislaus II of Poland (1732-98) The last king of Poland (1764-95), he was born Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, into an influential Polish family. From 1756 to 1758, he was Polish ambassador to St. Petersburg, where he became a lover of Empress Catherine II. Catherine, with the help of Frederick II of Prussia, secured Stanislaus's election to the Polish throne in 1764, after the death of Augustus III. Thus, Russian influence predominated in Poland, with the Russian ambassador at Warsaw being its virtual monarch. In 1768 a group of anti-Russian members of the Polish nobility revolted and declared Stanislaus deposed. However, the rebellion was crushed by the Russians, and in 1772, Russia, Prussia, and Austria decided the first Polish partition, taking vast territories from Poland. Although Stanislaus largely owed his throne to foreign powers, he sincerely attempted to bring about certain necessary political reforms. In 1773 a national commission began the complete reorganization of Polish education. In 1791 the diet adopted the May Constitution, which among other things strengthened the central administration and made public office accessible to the middle class. The lot of the peasants was improved, but serfdom was not abolished. After the death of Stanislaus, the throne was to become hereditary in the electoral branch of the house of Saxony. Russia, seeing its hold on Poland threatened, fostered the creation (1792) of the Confederation of Targovica, which sought to restore the old constitution. Russian troops, soon joined by Prussian forces, again invaded Poland. Stanislaus halted military resistance and, seeking a reconciliation with Russia, joined the Confederation of Targovica. The second Polish partition, in 1793, was the result. It left a truncated kingdom and made Stanislaus a vassal of Russia. The national uprising of 1794, led by Kosciusko, was defeated by Russian and Prussian troops, and in 1795 the third partition resulted in Poland's virtual annihilation and the end of the country's independence for over a century to come. Stanislaus, who had taken no firm stand in 1794, abdicated at Grodno and went to live in Russia. Not illustrious for his political role, he is best remembered for his generous and enlightened patronage of art, science, and especially literature. His Wednesday literary suppers were for a time the most brilliant social functions in Warsaw. He organized artistic patronage, favored modern art institutions such as the National Museum and the Academy of Fine Arts, and reunited a group of outstanding artists, primarily foreign. Among them were Bellotto and Bacciarelli, a polonized Italian. Bacciarelli directed a school of painting where a new generation of native Polish painters was educated. Another foreign artist who completely adopted Polish culture was Jan Piotr Norblin. One of Poniatowski's passions was clocks. Similarly to Louis XVI, Frederick II or Catherine II, he gathered an impressive collection of them. Poniatowski's fascination with clocks was the subject of Zuzanna Prószynska?s 1994 book "Zegary Stanislawa Augusta". From approximately 1764 onward, Poniatowski regularly bought clocks, mostly from France, placing them in his palace and employing several clockmakers to maintain them. After the first partition of Poland, he became more interested in the Polish national production, but still continued furnishing his palace with French clocks. In 1777, for instance, he ordered a monumental clock from Jacques-Joseph Lepaute de Bellefontaine, decorated with the Polish coat of arms. Like Louis XVI, Poniatowski was fond of giving watches as presents. Invoices and bills of sales clearly show that he possessed a considerable collection. Because of the many wars Poland suffered, very few of Poniatowski's clocks and watches have survived. The present collection contains three of them.