Wall clock (pendule en cartel)

Charles II Cressent (1685–1768) learned the craft of bronze casting from his father, François Cressent (1663–ca. 1745), and probably served an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker with his grandfather, Charles I Cressent (1625–1707), who was a master cabinetmaker in Amiens, France. He later moved to Paris, where he worked for the sculptors François Girardon (1628–1715) and Robert Le Lorrain (1666–1743), and in 1714, he became a master sculptor in the Parisian corporation of painters and sculptors, the Académie de Saint Luc. When he married the widow of a cabinetmaker who had been in the service of Philippe (1674–1723), the duc d’Orléans and Regent of France from 1715 to 1723, the marriage automatically admitted him to the Paris guild of cabinetmakers (ebenistes). Cressent’s furniture, with its exotic veneers and beautiful gilded-bronze mounts, would probably have found great favor on its own, but the patronage of the duc d’Orléans assured his success as a cabinetmaker.[1]



With the death of the regent in 1723, Cressent lost protection from the rules of the Paris guilds, under which he was prohibited from engaging in making his own furniture mounts. It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that in the same year a large number of these were confiscated from his workshop by the officials of the corporations of the bronze founders (bronziers / ciseleurs) and the gilders (doreurs).[2] The medium, more often gilded brass than gilded bronze, was in fact quite practical for use in the serial casting of ornaments and for the smallscale sculpture that the better Parisian cabinetmakers were increasingly incorporating into their designs. The fashion for mounting furniture with ornaments, however, did not come without creating conflict between the cabinetmakers and the founders, chasers, and gilders, all of whom were instrumental in producing furniture mounts in accord with the guild rules.



Among the bronzes seized in Cressent’s workshop in 1723 were two figures of Leda to be “placed below the dial [of a clock]” and a sphinx to be “used at the foot of a clock.”[3] Some of the mounts on a clock in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection (61.69) fit these descriptions, and they are fine enough to be the product of Cressent’s hand.[4] Leda, according to classical myth, was one of the loves of the god Zeus, who visited her in the guise of a swan. The elegant figure of Leda is seated in a relief below the dial of the clock, and the front feet of the clock are exquisitely modeled sphinxes. The case is made of tortoiseshell and brass applied to an oak carcass. While the case is not signed, it is known that Cressent’s admiration for the royal cabinetmaker André- Charles Boulle (1642–1732) resulted in his periodic use throughout his career of this kind of marquetry, often referred to as “Boulle work,” combined with sculptural mounts of gilded bronze.[5] For comparison, a clock and pedestal in the Museum’s collection (58.53a–c), with a case attributed to Boulle,[6] displays a similar pairing of tortoiseshell and brass marquetry with gilded-bronze sphinxes; these figures may be more earthbound than Cressent’s strange creatures, but they serve the same function as supporters of a clock. As cabinetmaker to King Louis XIV and occupant of one of the workshops (or logements) given as favors to artists and craftsmen who held royal appointments, Boulle was free to work in whatever medium he wished. Not so with Cressent, at least not in 1723.



It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, that within ten years Cressent had begun a series of clockcases that on first sight seem to be made entirely of gilded bronze. They are largely wall clocks, or cartels, rococo in style. They were cast from models provided by Cressent, and they often are ornamented with allegorical figures connected with time. The appearance of many of these clocks is deceiving, for they are composed of a number of separate pieces of gilded bronze that are screwed to carved wooden cores. The compartments containing the clock’s movement, too, have wooden sides veneered with Boulle marquetry.[7] Cressent’s imposing example in the Museum’s collection is unusually large. The construction may have been employed in part to lighten the weight of the clock, which, after all, had to be hung on a wall, but it may also have helped to satisfy some kind of compromise between Cressent and the Paris guilds. The result is a cabinetmaker’s solution, not a sculptor’s way of working.



It has been difficult to establish the sequence of Cressent’s cartel clocks and even more difficult to date them. Historian Marie-Juliette Ballot’s attempt[8] left much to be desired, and it was historian Theodore Dell who made order of the models based in part on descriptions of them in a series of eighteenth-century sales held by Cressent.[9] From evidence provided by the catalogues of these sales, it is certain that the model for the Museum’s cartel was in existence before January 1749, when one of the clocks made from that model was described in detail. It was said to represent Cupid seated in clouds and leaning on a sandglass above the dial, and Time holding his scythe placed on the chaos of the world below, with a base framed by two large trees.[10] The catalogue does not mention the name of a clockmaker, and so it has not been possible to identify which of the clocks made from this model was the one in the sale.[11]



The Museum’s clock has retained its original dial and movement, the latter signed on the back plate by Jean Godde the Elder. Not very much is known about him. According to historian Jean-Dominique Augarde, there is evidence that a Jean Godde did supply movements for cases made by Cressent,[12] but there were several Jean Goddes in Paris, and Augarde seems to have been confused about which of them might have identified himself as “the Elder.” The maker is most likely to have been the one who became a master clockmaker in 1691, and who died in 1748 or 1749,[13] a good reason for dating the clock to earlier than 1749. Dell classified the Metropolitan’s clock as “Type D” in a sequence of five models, but made no attempt at dating the model. The clock does not bear the tax mark on gilded bronze in use between 1745 and 1749, so it may, in fact, have been made before 1745.



The movement is spring driven, and it strikes hours and quarters on two separate trains. The dial is brass with a white enamel center and a gilded chapter of hours that is inlaid with separate plaques painted with roman numerals I–XII in blue on white enamel. The hour and minute hands are of blued steel.



Both the Triumph of Love and the Triumph of Time, based on the allegorical I Trionfi by the Italian poet Petrarch (1304–1374), would have been recognized immediately by many Europeans. These personifications appear in processions depicted in various visual media in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A notable example in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection is a Triumph of Time, depicted in a tapestry woven about 1500–1530 in the Southern Netherlands.[14] But the figures in the tapestry and in the rest of the series to which it belongs are not the gods of our wall clock.



In the eighteenth century the personifications of Love as the Greek god Eros, whether as the child Cupid or as a winged youth with bow and arrows, and Time as Chronos or, as the Romans knew him, Saturn, as an old man with a beard and scythe, were well known and the identities of the two human figures on the case of the clock would have needed no explanation. Their meaning, the Triumph of Love over Time or, alternatively, Love Vanquishing Time, would have been clear by their relative positions on the clock.



A series of clockcases either by or attributed to Boulle, with Boulle marquetry and gilded-bronze mounts representing Love and Time on their cases, began to appear about 1715.[15] The Saturnian figure of Time is especially interesting in light of Cressent’s use of the symbolism for his wall-clock cases. It is a figure of an old man with beard and wings in a semi-reclining position who holds up a scale in his right hand. The origin of the design has been traced to an Italian woodcut, that, in turn, reproduces a design by Giovanni Antonio Pordenone (1484–1539).[16] But the model for the bronze version used by Boulle is known to have been supplied to him by the sculptor Girardon.[17] Cressent worked for Girardon during his early years in Paris, and he probably would have known Girardon’s models and undoubtedly knew one or more of Boulle’s clockcases. This knowledge must have played a role in Cressent’s choice of subject for his own series of wall clocks and is visibly the inspiration for the lively infant and the old man with the scythe bent over a pile of rock work (rocaille) representing not only the “chaos of the world,” as Cressent described it,[18] but also the influence of the fashionable rocaille or rococo style of ornament (61.69).



Cressent made several other versions of this clockcase. One, also described in the 1749 sale, had a figure of Time at the top threatening a frightened infant below, who is seemingly trying to escape the chaotic rockwork and a menacing C-scroll in the space below the dial.[19] He also used both the figure of Time and of Cupid separately on other clockcases.



The case of the Metropolitan Museum’s clock is in excellent condition, even to the extent of preserving Cupid’s sandglass, now missing on the example in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.[20] A later escapement has been substituted for an earlier one, which was probably a verge and crown wheel with a silk-thread suspension for a short pendulum.



A paper label attached to the inside of the case suggests that the clock was in Genoa, Italy, in the nineteenth century. Alexandre Pradère provides as provenance a sale in Paris in 1960 and to the art dealers Rosenberg and Stiebel in New York.[21]



Notes (For key to shortened references see bibliography in Vincent and Leopold, European Clocks and Watches in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015)



[1] See Pradere 2003, pp. 19–21.

[2] Part of the list of confiscated bronzes appears in ibid., pp. 201–4.

[3] Ibid., p. 190, no. 17, “Plus deux figures . . . representans Leyda, lequels sont pour mettre au-dessous de cadrans . . . ,” and no. 41, “Plus un sphinx servant a mettre aux pieds de pendule.”

[4] Acc. no. 61.69. The movement is by Louis Mynuel (ca. 1675/80–1742).

[5] See Watson 1956, p. 60.

[6] Acc. no. 58.53a–c. The movement is signed “J. Thuret,” probably for Isaac II Thuret (1630–1706). See James Parker in Parker et al. 1989, pp. 16–17; Jeffrey Munger in Kisluk-Grosheide and Munger 2010, pp. 52–54, no. 13. See also Ottomeyer and Proschel 1986, vol. 1, p. 44, and vol. 2, pp. 483–85.

[7] For illustrations of the disassembled parts of the case of a similar clock in the Wallace Collection, London, see Hughes 1994, p. 42; Hughes 1996, vol. 1, pp. 403, 404, 406.

[8] Ballot 1919, pp. 1–96.

[9] Dell 1967. See also Pradere 2003, pp. 176–99, 295–300.

[10] See Pradere 2003, p. 333, no. 25, “Une magnifique pendule de bronze, dont la composition est du meilleur gout, il y a sur le haut un Amour qui est assis sur des nuages, il appuye son coude sur un sable. Au dessous du cadran, est la figure du Tems, tenant sa faulx, & pose sur le cahos du monde, les pieds sont formes par deux grandes arbres; le tout parfaitement sizele, dore d’or moulu, de quatre pieds trois pouces de haut.”

[11] See ibid., p. 299, no. 228, for the clock in the Metropolitan Museum. At least three other extant clocks of the period fit the description of the case. They are now in the Musee du Louvre, Paris; the Wallace Collection; and the Hotel de Ville, Marseille; ibid., p. 229, nos. 225–27. There are probably several more in private collections.

[12] Augarde 1996, p. 327.

[13] See Tardy 1971–72, vol. 1, p. 261.

[14] Acc. no. 41.167.1. For a discussion of the tapestry and its iconography, see Cavallo 1993, pp. 463–78, no. 33, especially pp. 471–72.

[15] For an example in the Wallace Collection, see Hughes 1994, pp. 18–19. For another example, in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, see Gillian Wilson in Wilson et al. 1996, pp. 20–27, no. iv. See also Ottomeyer and Proschel 1986, vol. 1, pp. 38–40.

[16] The woodcut has been attributed to Nicolo Vincentino or Andrea Andriani (or Andreani) after a finished drawing by Pordenone that was formerly in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire. See Ottomeyer and Proschel 1986, vol. 1, p. 38, no. 1.2.2, ill. p. 39, and vol. 2, p. 475, and p. 474, fig. 4; Wilson in Wilson et al. 1996, pp. 23, 27, nn. 5, 6, and p. 25, fig. 4d.

[17] See Wilson in Wilson et al. 1996, pp. 23, 27, n. 9.

[18] See note 10 above.

[19] Pradere 2003, p. 333, no. 47. For an example of this version now in the palace of Het Loo in the Netherlands, see Pradere 2003, pp. 188–89, 300, no. 233.

[20] Ibid., p. 299, no. 225.

[21] Palais Galliera 1960, no. 25, pl. xiv. See Pradere 2003, p. 299, no. 228.