Wall clock (cartel)

During the eighteenth century in Europe enthusiasm for exotica from Asia was far from new. Imported Chinese porcelain and Japanese lacquers had been highly prized throughout the seventeenth century, and a variety of fantastic ornament that drew heavily upon Chinese-inspired ornamental motifs began to appear on seventeenth-century European-made objects as diverse as English silver and French woven silks. The style came to be known as chinoiserie.



Japanese porcelain, too, appealed to European collectors, and the exportation of Imari and Kakiemon wares (see 1995.268.235)—the latter produced in Arita on the Japanese island of Kyushu during the period after 1639 when the Tokugawa Shoguns closed the country to all but a very few foreign traders—is an interesting story in itself.[1] Nevertheless, we know that in an inventory made in 1688 of Burghley House, the Elizabethan country seat in Cambridgeshire built by William Cecil (1520–1598), there were Japanese porcelains that can still be identified.[2]



In France, a surviving inventory of the collection of Louis-Henri de Bourbon, Prince de Condé (1692–1740), lists more than two thousand porcelains, many of Japanese origin.[3] The prince, who had been minister to his cousin King Louis XV (1710–1774) of France, was exiled to the prince’s estate at Chantilly in 1726, where he became the patron of a soft-paste porcelain manufactory initiated by Cicaire Cirou (born 1700).[4] By 1735 Cirou had been granted a patent by the king for the right to make porcelain specifically in imitation of Japanese porcelain. The Prince de Condé’s collection was disbursed during the French Revolution (1789–99), and it is not now possible to identify precisely what it contained.[5] It is, however, possible to compare several of the Japanese figures known from the Burghley House inventory with the three human figures on the Metropolitan Museum’s clock. Their egg-shaped heads, the pencil-thin black outlines of their features, and their small red mouths and pure white skin are recognizable, in particular, in the two boys seated on drums that are still at Burghley House.[6] The palette of burnt orange, light blue, sea green, coal black for the hair, and, especially, the whiteness of the skin achieved at Chantilly by the application of a white tin-glaze over the natural, yellow-tinted Chantilly clay, very closely resembles the coloring of the Japanese figures. The fabric designs for the kimonos worn by the French-made figures are not found on the Japanese examples at Burghley House, but they do derive from designs on Japanese Kakiemon hollowwares of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.[7] It is known that the Prince de Condé had a number of these in his collection, but taken together, these similarities lead one to believe that the collection also must have contained at least one comparable Japanese figure.



The three figures, magots in the parlance of the period,[8] on the case of this clock inhabit two pieces of asymmetrically shaped porcelain that are, in turn, bolted to a brass plate cut to fit the contours of the porcelain and gilded where visible. The porcelain ground consists of free-form rocaille ornament colored in shades of lavender and light brown, overlying brilliant green porous rockwork. Tendrils with burnt orange, lemon yellow, and white flowers and green leaves on the left side of the case are integral to the porcelain body, as are two of the human figures, one gesturing toward the dial of the clock and the second toward the pendulum. The rocaille crest and the figure with a globe are separate pieces, as are the more exotically colored blossoms. The blossoms are attached to double-stemmed branches of gilded brass, which are bolted to the brass plate that supports the porcelain body. One of these elements frames the magot with the globe; the second element covers most of the aperture below the dial that is meant to display the oscillation of the pendulum.



This highly decorative case frames a white-enamel dial with the hours (I–XII) painted in blue enamel and the minutes (5–60, by fives) painted in black. A hole at the six o’clock position allows the insertion of a key for winding the spring-driven movement of the clock, and two pierced-brass hands complete the requirements of time-telling. The clockmaker’s name, “·ESTIENNE·LENOIR·,” and place, “·AParis·,” are painted within the hour chapter.



Housed in a circular brass cylinder hidden inside the porcelain case is the movement, consisting of two circular brass plates containing a single train with a verge escapement and short pendulum. Due to the fact that the clock does not strike the hours, it probably would have been intended for installation on the wall of a sleeping alcove in the bedroom of a French mansion. Not all wall clocks, or cartels, of the kind were silent, however, and it is difficult to generalize about cartels made of Chantilly porcelain as there are only two other known examples: one in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, with both a going train and a repeating train, which could be released at will to strike the hours on a bell;9 and the second in the Uhrenmuseum Beyer Zürich, with a movement striking both hours and half hours.[10]



“Etienne Le Noir,” the signature on the back plate of the Metropolitan Museum’s clock, probably refers to Etienne I Le Noir (1675–1739), who became a master clockmaker in Paris in 1698 and opened a shop called Aux Tuileries in the Place Dauphine the same year. He was the son of the Paris clockmaker Simon Le Noir (master in 1640), father of Etienne II Le Noir (1699–1778), and grandfather of Pierre-Etienne Le Noir (ca. 1724–after 1789).[11] According to historian Jean- Dominique Augarde, Etienne II signed his clocks “Etienne Le Noir le fils” until after 1740, when he, too, signed simply “Etienne Le Noir.” Etienne II and Pierre-Etienne worked as partners from 1750 to 1771 making movements for lavishly decorated clockcases for aristocratic patrons in France and all over the rest of Europe.[12] A highly successful clockmaker, Etienne II died a rich man. He may have been the maker of the movement for the Museum’s clock, but the probable early date of the porcelain case and the relative simplicity of the movement make the clock more likely to have been the work of Etienne I Le Noir.



While more or less similar in shape to the Metropolitan Museum’s cartel, the cartel in the Beyer collection has an allover pattern of milky white morning glories set among leafy tendrils of gilded brass. The Getty Museum’s cartel is somewhat closer in design to the Metropolitan’s, having three polychrome figures at somewhat analogous points in the design, but these are not human. They derive instead from the Chinese world of animal motifs, being a dragon, a monkey, and a goose, and they inhabit a far more homogeneous array of porcelain flowers than the figures of the Metropolitan Museum’s clock. A gilded-brass vine borders the entire case of the clock, adding to the comparative homogeneity of the rather dense ornament and perhaps allowing greater safety in handling the delicate porcelain.



With this example in mind, the edges of the Metropolitan’s cartel were examined to see if there were traces of similar elements. Channels cut on either side of the edge of the plate near the lower edges of the porcelain crest were found to contain empty holes drilled and tapped to receive screws; traces of holes for screws on either side of the edge of the brass plate about three quarters of the way down from the top of the porcelain case would seem to indicate, at the least, a change of plan in the design. Close examination also revealed that the two double sprays of gilded-brass leafy branches with porcelain flowers are bolted directly to the brass plate in a rather careless manner by means of bolts that do not match the ones used to attach the porcelain elements to the plate. The flowers attached to these branches are of Chantilly porcelain, but most of their shapes and colors do not resemble those of the flowers that are integral to the body of the case, leading to the suspicion that the branches were additions, perhaps made to please the original patron or perhaps added at a later date but by someone who had a plentiful supply of Chantilly flowers. Seven of the intended blossoms are now missing, but the remaining ten seem less than coherent additions to the original design. Certainly, the flowers and animal figures on the case of the Getty Museum’s clock are better integrated, as is the allover pattern of morning glories on the Beyer Museum’s clock.



There is damage to the cheek and ear of the magot on the right side of the Metropolitan Museum’s clock. The movement, which is held in place by means of four screws attached through four holes in the dial plate, has been repositioned, requiring three extra holes. Three of the screws are now stripped, and it is possible that a new bezel and lens for the dial may have been necessary when the position was changed.



Before entering the New York collection of Jack and Belle Linsky,[13] the clock belonged to Lady Margaret Fortescue, Castle Hill, Devonshire, England.[14]



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 Impey 1990.

2 Burghley Porcelains 1986, p. 154, no. 51; pp. 220–21, no. 89; pp. 232–33, no. 95; pp. 238–39, no. 98.

3 Minutier central, xcii, 504, Archives Nationales, Paris.

4 Le Duc 1993, pp. 8–9.

5 Nelson and Impey 1994.

6 Burghley Porcelains 1986, pp. 220–21, no. 89.

7 Ballu 1958.

8 For a discussion of the meaning of the term in eighteenth-century France, see Kisluk-Grosheide 2002, p. 177.

9 Acc. no. 81.DB.81. The movement is by Charles Voisin (1685–1761). See Gillian Wilson in Wilson et al. 1996, pp. 42–47, no. vi.

10 By Julien Le Roy (1686–1759), probably the best clockmaker in eighteenth-century France and known to have had a very large workshop; see Jean-Neree Ronfort and Jean-Dominique Augarde in Wilson et al., pp. 185–90. For the clock, see Museum der Zeitmessung Beyer 1982, pp. 64–65.

11 Tardy 1971–72, vol. 2, pp. 374, 376.

12 Augarde 1996, p. 347; Ronfort and Augarde in Wilson et al. 1996, p. 177. See also Tardy 1971–72, vol. 2, p. 376.

13 William Rieder in Metropolitan Museum of Art 1984, pp. 238–39, no. 147.

14 See Christie’s 1966, p. 38, no. 145, and frontispiece.