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Lot Essay
The ormolu-enriched marble clock or 'pendule de cheminée', evoking poetry and the Homeric Hymns, 'To Asculpius', has its movement borne by Apollo's addorsed and sphere-guarding griffin, and is incorporated in an enflamed and veil-draped altar pillar, which is attended by Apollo's granddaughter Hygieia. The Greek goddess of Health also takes care of the serpent, emblematical of the healing cult of Asclepius. The festive bas-relief of its Grecian-stepped plinth displays a procession at an altar similar to an engraving of 1790 after the Rome-trained sculptor Jean-Guillaume Moitte (d. 1810) (G. Gramaccini, Jean-Guillaume Moitte, Berlin 1993, vol. 11, fig. 258).
This relief also features on a clock, whose studious marble figures have been attributed to the sculptor Louis-Simon Boizot (d. 1809) (W. Edey, French Clocks in North American Collections, New York, 1983, no 84).
This relief also features on a clock, whose studious marble figures have been attributed to the sculptor Louis-Simon Boizot (d. 1809) (W. Edey, French Clocks in North American Collections, New York, 1983, no 84).