A gilt bronze and marble vase clock
A late Louis XV gilt bronze and vert Antique marble vase clock à cercles tournants,
signed Courieult à Paris – circa 1770
The case by Jean-Baptiste Gaulier
Gabriel Courieult, maître on 3 September 1767
Height: 40.5 cm. (16 in.) Width: 17.5 cm. (7 in.) Depth: 17.5 cm. (7 in.)
The clock operates as two horizontal gilt bronze circles indicating the hours and minutes with enamelled Roman and Arabic numerals which rotate around a fixed blued steel hand. The rectangular movement engraved with the signature has a recoil anchor escapement and wire suspension and strikes the hours and half-hours by means of a count-wheel mounted on the back-plate.
Provenance
Vassy & Jalenques, Clermont-Ferrand, 18 June 2005, lot 40
Madame Bert
Literature
- and A. Wannenes, Les plus belles pendules Françaises: de Louis XIV à l’Empire = The finest French pendulum-clocks: from Louis XIV to the Empire, Florence, 2013, p. 259 (ill.)
Comparative Literature
A similar unsigned clock with oval painted copper plates representing genre scenes now in the musée du Louvre and formerly belonging to the Comte d’Orsay in his hôtel particulier on the rue de Varenne is illustrated in D. Alcouffe et al., Les bronzes d’ameublement du Louvre, Paris, 2004, p. 136, no. 63.
Another with Sèvres porcelain plates delivered by the marchand-mercier Poirier to Madame du Barry on 18 November 1768 is published in S. Eriksen, Early Neo-Classicism in France, London, 1974, pp. 347-348, no. 197.