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RICHARD REDDING ANTIQUES |
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RICHARD REDDING ANTIQUES |
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A rare and very beautiful Directoire gilt bronze mounted porcelain and white marble mantle clock, signed on the reverse of the base Manufacture du duc d’ Angoulême, the white enamel signed Jacob à Paris with black Arabic numerals for the hours and minutes interspersed by florets and inner red Arabic numerals (with black numerals for 10, 20 and 30) for the days of the Republican 30 day calendar ring, with a very fine pair of pierced gilt brass hands for the hours and minutes and a blued steel pointer for the calendar indications. The movement with anchor escapement, striking on the hour and half hour with outside count wheel. The superb case with magnificent porcelain work by the duc d’Angoulême porcelain factory surmounted by a biscuit porcelain figure of a youthful winged Cupid, seated on a cloud with his quiver of arrows at his feet as he attends to his gilt bronze bow, on a shaped square plinth with projecting canted corners above a painted porcelain frieze featuring a central ovolo band and foliate sprays at the corners, the dial with a gilt bronze bezel with painted gold colour grisaille plaques to simulate foliate spandrels at each corner, flanked by gilt bronze scrolled tapering pilasters hung with laurel wreaths on lion paw feet, the sides with painted cream grisaille porcelain arabesque panels enclosing grotesque masks and floral trails, on a rectangular white marble base with a gilt bronze beaded bordered porcelain frieze with a central grotesque mask flanked by arabesque scrolls with stylized cornflowers, on turned foliate cast feet Paris, date circa 1793-5 Height 51 cm, width 30 cm, depth 25 cm. Literature: Pierre Kjellberg, “Encyclopédie de la Pendule Française du Moyen Age au XXe Siècleâ€, 1997, p. 341, pl. A, illustrating this clock. The beautiful case was made by the duc d’Angoulême porcelain factory, which was founded in 1780 by Christophe Dihl (1752-1830) who in 1786 took into partnership Antoine Guérhard (d.1793), accompanied by his wife Louise-Françoise-Madeleine Croizé (1751-1831). Under the protection of the duc d’Angoulême, eldest son of the comte d’Artois, it was recorded in the Parisian rue de Bondy from 1781 until circa 1789 and then at rue de Temple from 1789 up until 1828. Dihl and Guérhard specialised in the production of extremely fine quality biscuit and hard paste porcelain as well as jasper plaques that imitated those by Wedgwood. The factory was particularly well patronised by the Garde-Meuble, for whom it supplied biscuit figures and objects priced between 60 to 1200 francs and clock cases ranging from 200 to 6000 francs. While living near Paris, Benjamin Franklin purchased a tea service decorated with cornflowers for his daughter, 1785 (now in the Carnegie Museum of Art, University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere). In addition to the finest quality and elaborately decorated tableware, vases, clock cases and ornaments, the factory produced a range of biscuit figurines, some of which were free standing while other such as we see here were integrated into the decoration of clock cases. Following the relaxation of laws protecting the monopoly of porcelain manufacture at Sèvres in 1766 and 1770, a number of other factories appeared in Paris under the protection of members of the royal family or other notable figures. Some such as the Angoulême factory began to seriously rival Sèvres and Dihl, a man of broad scientific aptitudes, is recorded as the first to establish a complete palette of colours that could be used for the decoration of hard paste porcelain. The factory also successfully reproduced all the underglaze coloured grounds used at Sèvres as well as all the colours for on-glaze painting. In 1784 it became one of the few Paris porcelain factories to be granted a royal decree that allowed the use of polychrome painting in conjunction with gilded. The clock movement was made by Nicolas-Jacques Jacob, who was born in 1747 and began his apprenticeship in 1766. The dial features a rare Republican calendar ring. Introduced in 1793, this new time system stipulated that the months should be divided into 30 days, days into ten hours and hours into 100 minutes. Few dials show true Revolutionary time but some, such as this example, show the new calendar divisions. However, the new time scale proved so complicated that in 1795 it was abandoned in favour of the former Gregorian system. http://www.richardreddingantiques.com/collection/horology/a-directoire-gilt-bronze-mounted-porcelain-and-white-marble-mantle-clock-signed-on-the-reverse-of-t |
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