Alarm Watch with Juno

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Typical of the fancy watches produced before the era of enamel, this delicately engraved oval case is embellished with the graceful figures of the goddess Juno with her peacock on the front and Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt, on the back. The designs are copied from engravings by Étienne Delaune (1519-1583), a French goldsmith and designer, who created prints as models for craftsmen unskilled in drawing figures.

Longcase Regulator with Equation Work and Calendar (Régulateur à equation), ca. 1768–70
Movement by Ferdinand Berthoud (French, 1727–1807); Case by Balthazar Lieutaud (French, ca. 1720–1780)
Case: oak veneered with ebony, with gilt-bronze mounts and glass panel; Dial: white enamel with black numerals; Movement: brass and steel

90 1/2 x 21 1/2 x 12 3/4 in. (229.87 x 54.61 x 32.39 cm)
The Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, 1982 (1982.60.50)

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The case, designed in a severe Neoclassical style with added Chinese ornamental motifs, was made by one of the leading cabinetmakers, or ébénistes, of mid-eighteenth-century Paris. It is fitted with a tall glass panel in the trunk for the prominent display of the characteristically heavy French version of the gridiron pendulum that regulates the escapement of the movement. The dial displays hours, minutes, and seconds indicated by a spray of concentrically mounted hands. The minute hand, ornamented with a sunburst, was originally intended to show true solar time. (The hand for mean solar time is now missing.) Berthoud made a specialty of equation timepieces: clocks and watches that show both true solar time, which varies slightly according to the season of the year, and mean solar time, which does not. His first equation clock was approved by the French Académie des Sciences in 1752.

Mameluke Clock - Jacob Petit

Circa 1845

Paris porcelain

56 x 44 x 26 cm

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A porcelain-maker based in Paris and then Avon near Fontainebleau, Jacob-Petit is famous for his decorative objects, bottles, nightlights, inkwells and clocks, whose baroque exuberance was inspired by 18th-century French and German styles.

The figure of the Mameluke horseman was inspired by a work by Debucourt, The Retreating Mameluke, engraved in 1803 after a watercolour by Carle Vernet. The profusion of gold that emphasises the rocaille contours of the ornamentation, the exuberance of the ornamentation and the shimmering, harmonious colours express the verve and inventiveness of the most famous French porcelain-maker of 1830-1860.

oldroze:

Watch, ca. 1645-50
Movement by Jacques Goullons, or Coullons (French, recorded 1626, died 1671)
Case and dial: painted enamel on gold; Movement: gilded brass, steel, partly blued, and silver

An increasing number of sources from which seventeenth-century French enamelers of watchcases took their designs have been identified, and it now seems safe to say that many were content to reproduce in miniature the work of other artists. Prints were often the medium of transmission, but in some cases it seems that the enameler had direct access to either a painting or a colored drawing of a painting. The miniatures on the exterior of this watchcase depict the Virgin and Child with an Angel, from an engraving by Pierre Daret (1605–1678), and Joseph Awakened by the Angel, adapted from an engraving by Michel Dorigny (1617–1665). Both engravings record paintings by Simon Vouet (1590–1649), the former now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen, France, the latter now lost. Goullons was clockmaker to Gaston, duc d’Orléans (1608–1660), brother of King Louis XIII (1601–1643), and probably later to Philippe, duc d’Orléans (1640–1701), brother of King Louis XIV (1638–1715). He seems to have specialized in making movements for watches with painted enamel cases, including one for Louis XIV himself, which is now in the Robert Lehman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum. Goullon’s specialty is not surprising considering that Gaston d’Orléans was also the patron of a flourishing group of enamelers working in Blois, the city of the duke’s residence.

Table clock, Abbeville, Nicolas Plantart, 16th century

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Horloges révolutionnaires (décimales)
(journée de 10h de 100 minutes de 100 secondes)
officiellement en vigueur du 5 octobre 1793 au 7 avril 1795

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Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used to refer specifically to French Revolutionary Time, which divides the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds, as opposed to the more familiar standard time, which divides the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds.

Decimal time was officially introduced during the French Revolution; the National Convention issued a decree on 5 October 1793. Although clocks and watches were produced with faces showing both standard time with numbers 1–24 and decimal time with numbers 1–10, decimal time never caught on; it was not officially used until the beginning of the Republican year III, 22 September 1794, and mandatory use was suspended 7 April 1795 (18 Germinal of the Year III), in the same law which introduced the original metric system.

For fun, if you want to compare the decimal and the duodecimal time…

vacuidad:

Astronomical clock in the Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Lyon in Lyon, France

The clock is one of the oldest in Europe and has an astrolabe that indicates the date, the position of the moon, the sun, and the earth, as well as the stars in the sky over Lyon. Created in the age of geocentrism, the sun is shown circling the earth. An astronomical clock was first documented in the cathedral in 1383. It was almost completely destroyed during a 1562 raid by the Baron of Adrets during the War of Religions, and in 1661 was reconstructed by master Lyonnais clockmaker Guillaume Nourrisson. During the French Revolution, all ornamentation that referenced royalty, like coats of arms and fleur-de-lys, was stripped from the clock. The last restoration was in 1954, when the clock’s perpetual calendar of 66 years was reset. It will be accurate until 2019.

Organ pipe clock with a monkey orchestra - Jean Moisy (clockmaker) and Jean-Claude Chambellan known as Duplessis ( goldsmith)

Porcelain figures based on models by Johann-Joachim Kändler and Peter Reinicke

Circa 1755-1760

Gilded bronze work, Vincennes soft-paste porcelain flowers, hard-paste Meissen porcelain figurines

130 x 85 cm

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This exceptional piece was probably a private commission, perhaps through the intermediary of a major marchand-mercier [decorative arts dealer operating outside the guild system] such as Lazare Duvaux, who sold a monkey orchestra to Madame de Pompadour in December 1753.

The contrast between gilded bronze and polychrome porcelain came into vogue in clockmaking during the 1730s.

Jean Moisy (1714-1782), the creator of the clock mechanism, became a master craftsman in Paris in 1753, at the age of 39. He systematically numbered all the movements leaving his workshop and this one bears the number 558.

Porcelain of different origins is juxtaposed on the same piece, such as the soft-paste Vincennes porcelain flowers and German hard-paste porcelain figures. At Vincennes, the taste for natural-looking flowers reached its peak in 1751. The exotic monkey theme was initially designed to decorate interior panelling.

The first porcelain monkey orchestras may have appeared in Mennecy in France post 1740, but they reached the peak of refinement in Germany. In Meissen in Saxony, the master modeller Johann-Joachim Kändler (1709-1775) set the standard shortly before 1750 with the charming design used here which he revisited and modified circa 1765 with the help of his collaborator Peter Reinicke (1715-1768).

Horloges Saint-Nicolas signées Spriridion Cartier
Spriridion Cartier
Horloge de gauche,1828, dépôt du Château musée de Dieppe.
© Musée de l’horlogerie, Saint-Nicolas d’Aliermont.

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Spiridion Cartier (1801-1878) was a master cabinet-maker in Bures-en-Bray, on the banks of the river Béthune, around 1840-1850. He was a third-generation cabinet-maker. His marriage licence states that he is a “master carpenter”. The 1851 census says that his daughter is a “sculptress” - she probably worked with her father on the decoration for his clocks.

The pediment features a sculpted jardinière on a piedouche (a small pedestal), with curved “swan neck” handles and two flowers in its centre, one of which is always a rose (on the left for the clock from the Château-Musée in Dieppe, and the right for the clock from the Musée de l’Horlogerie). Among a garland of stylised leaves and flowers (anemone and lilac) there is a trilobate leaf on top of the pediment with a small leaf slightly inclined to one side.

There are carved leaves, flowers, and bunches of grapes on each side of the dial. At the foot and on both sides of the base of the head, there are two carved scrolls. The ornamentation in front of the pendulum is often missing, as it is extremely fragile. Both these clocks feature birds standing beak-to-beak: one wing is folded, and the other stretched out so that both are visible.

On the upper part of the clock’s case there is a carved woven basket in the same style: in the centre, there are two flowers, one of which is a rose; in between, there are lilac and forget-me-nots, and on both sides either a trilobate leaf or a bouquet. The door is always in-set and decorated with mouldings of ears of corn or pearls. The dial is enamel with Roman numerals. The hands are “Sun” hands. The pendulum bears a large lens.

Around 1860, Cartier produced several “luxury” clocks and several Bacquevillais clocks - grandfather clocks whose cases were made by cabinet-makers from Bacqueville-en-Caux, and which were fitted with a Comtoise movement and flower-adorned head, similar to the clocks from Saint-Nicolas