Lot Essay
The medallion on this clock bears the name of the French sculptor François Morel of the rue Jean Beausire, Paris, who was elected to the Académie St. Luc in 1770. It bears a portrait of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (d. 1844), Maréchal de France from 1804, Prince of Ponte Corvo in Italy from 1806 and from 1818, King Karl XIV Johan of Sweden. Karl XIV Johan was adopted by the then King Karl XIII in 1810, when parliament elected him successor to the throne, and founded the Bernadotte dynasty. He fought against Napoléon at the battle of Leipzig in 1813. Interestingly the birth date on the clock is given slightly wrongly, as he was in fact born in 1763.
This clock, designed in the French 'antique' or 'Egyptian' style of the 1780s popularised by David Roentgen, displays the framed medallion of Karl XIV Johan beneath a bas-relief 'Science' trophy comprising an oak and laurel-garlanded orrery, telescope, etc. Its pearl-rimmed case, shaped as a flame-capped obelisk symbolising Wisdom's eternal triumph, is wreathed by a festive ribbon above bacchic lion-paw feet. An arabesque ribbon-guilloche of palm-flowered Roman foliage is inset in the frieze of its Grecian-stepped plinth that is likewise pearl-rimmed in the 'Etruscan' manner. A vase-capped marble clock, of related 'obelisk' form, is displayed in the Red Salon at Rosersberg, Sweden, which was decorated shortly before Karl XIV Johan's succession in 1809 (H. Groth, Neoclassicism in the North, New York, 1990, p. 141).
This clock, designed in the French 'antique' or 'Egyptian' style of the 1780s popularised by David Roentgen, displays the framed medallion of Karl XIV Johan beneath a bas-relief 'Science' trophy comprising an oak and laurel-garlanded orrery, telescope, etc. Its pearl-rimmed case, shaped as a flame-capped obelisk symbolising Wisdom's eternal triumph, is wreathed by a festive ribbon above bacchic lion-paw feet. An arabesque ribbon-guilloche of palm-flowered Roman foliage is inset in the frieze of its Grecian-stepped plinth that is likewise pearl-rimmed in the 'Etruscan' manner. A vase-capped marble clock, of related 'obelisk' form, is displayed in the Red Salon at Rosersberg, Sweden, which was decorated shortly before Karl XIV Johan's succession in 1809 (H. Groth, Neoclassicism in the North, New York, 1990, p. 141).