1st August 2019
THE VIENNA CITY CLOCK COLLECTION
Tabea Rude
For our August lecture we look forward to welcoming Tabea Rude.
Tabea trained at West Dean College gaining a Master’s degree in Horology. Before moving to Vienna Tabea spent eighteen months working at The Clockworks.
The Vienna City clock collection is part of the Vienna City museum group, which comprises of 22 museums and historic houses, as well as the city archaeology department. Although the collection is only a very small part of the entire museum group, with over 5000 objects it is the largest horological collection in Austria. The 700 key pieces of this collection are housed in a historic building in central Vienna, which has functioned as a publicly accessible clock museum since 1921.
Tabea was appointed as the horological conservator for the entire horological collection in 2017. This involves documenting and organising the reserve collection in a new purpose-built art storage building, as well as getting to know Viennese horology and the key objects in the collection.
Tabea will talk about the early beginnings of the museum and its key collections acquired in the 1910-20s. Through the following “tour on slides”, everyone is invited to get to know the key objects’ histories as well as the quirky and -at least locally- famous personalities associated with them. From Austro-Hungarian monarchs, poets and monks to bankrupt actresses and failed inventors- the collection contains many interesting stories, clocks, watches and automata.