MID-19TH CENTURY

This spectacular 'sacred urn' clock is conceived in the Louis XVI 'Roman' fashion, and recalls festivities in antiquity. Its ribbon-dial is incorporated in a triumphal palm-wrapped urn, whose bacchic thyrsus boss and entwined serpent handles derive from a wine-krater vase, while its addorsed 'Atlas' caryatids comprise kneeling satyrs, the wine god's Arcadian man/goat companions. Its bronze figures, accompanying an urn, recall the 'Michel-Ange' clock of the Louis XIV period, such as that from the Prince de Cond's collection at Chantilly preserved at the Archives Nationales, Paris. The impressive quality of these figures corresponds to that of the model for a pendule cercles tournants executed in several versions in the 1830's and 1840's by the bronzier Jean-Baptiste-Franois Deninger, known as Denire, who was associated with the bronzier Mathelin until 1820, and passed on his business to his son in the 1840's (a clock of this model attributed to Denire, originally in the collection of the 4th Marquis of Hertford in the chteau de Bagatelle and possibly ordered directly from Denire, will be sold from the Collection of Akram Ojjeh, Christie's Monaco, 11 December 1999, lot 10).