LEPINE, PARIS, NO. 4244. CIRCA 1785

The movement and dial of this superbly chased ormolu cartel clock are signed by the workshop founded by Jean Antoine Lépine (1720-1814), Horloger of Louis XV, Louis XVI and Napoléon I. Lépine was highly talented and invented several of the refnements in French watchmaking in the second half of the 18th Century. In 1765, he married André Caron’s daughter and worked as ‘Caron et Lepine’ until 1769. In 1783, Lepine left his business to his son-in-law, Claude Pierre Raguet, who continued to sign his clocks ‘Lepine’ and apparently begun numbering them from 4000.

The numbering ‘4244’ on the present example would indicate a manufacturing date at the pinnacle of his career around 1785, and possibly corresponds to one of the deliveries he made to the Court of Louis XVI at Versailles. Indeed, three cartel clocks by Lépine and probably of this model, are recorded in 1787 in the Etat des Pendules du roy, Service du garde meuble. Each are described as: ‘grand cartel à branches de lauriers en bronze doré d’or moulu, h. de 36 po. Sur 17 po. de large, par Lépine’. One of these cartel clocks was listed in the cabinet des nobles of Madame Elisabeth, daughter of Louis XV, one in the salon of Monsieur de Breteuil at Versailles; another was inventoried in the apartment of Monsieur de Crécy in the Hôtel du Garde-Meuble in Paris. The extraordinary large scale of the present model and the fnely naturalistically cast ‘branches de lauriers’ (laurel branches) decorating the lower section of its ormolu case could indicate such a Royal provenance.