The Mantel Clock from the Holmes Residence

This finely crafted gilt-brass mantel clock once stood above the main fireplace in the home of Henry Howard Holmes in Chicago. Executed in late Rococo style, with acanthus leaf motifs and flame-like scrollwork, the piece likely dates to the 1870s and was acquired by Holmes during one of his travels through Europe—perhaps in Paris or Vienna—where he was known to favor objects that combined mechanical precision with theatrical elegance.
Its white enamel dial, adorned with Roman numerals and twin winding holes, marked the hours with a deep, resonant chime that punctuated the days within Holmes’s household like a silent metronome to his restless existence.
Following Holmes’s imprisonment in 1895, the house was sealed for several months. However, according to a letter discovered among the court archives, his longtime friend, Mr. Alistair Fenwick, was granted permission to enter the property in order to “retrieve personal effects of sentimental value.” It was during this visit that the clock was removed from the drawing room and transported to Fenwick’s estate in Vermont, where it remained for more than half a century.
A rare photograph, now preserved in private hands, depicts Holmes with the clock clearly visible above the fireplace—an image that confirms its placement and presence within the domestic architecture of his infamous residence.
This clock is not merely an object of timekeeping—it is a witness. It stood in the presence of one of America’s most enigmatic figures, marking hours that history would later dissect with unease and fascination. I regard it as a relic of psychological architecture, a decorative sentinel in a house of shadows. Its survival is not accidental—it is deliberate, as if time itself conspired to preserve it. The photograph only deepens its resonance, anchoring the object within a moment of historical tension. To possess it is to hold a fragment of narrative suspense, where elegance and dread quietly coexist.
Doktor Lazarus Archaeologist, Historian, Collector, Independent Curator