AN EMPIRE ORMOLU AND TÔLE PEINTE STRIKING PENDULE À CERCLES TOURNANTES

This gilt-enriched mantel-clock is conceived in the late 18th Century manner to celebrate Love's triumph and 'sacrifices at Love's altar in Antiquity'. Apollo's pythian serpent marks the hour on an urn-capped sacred altar, that is formed from a truncated pagan column japanned in trompe l'oeil Egyptian porphyry. Its stepped altar plinth bears a golden bas-relief of studious genii celebrating the sun-deity Apollo's Mt. Parnassus role as leader of the Muses of the Arts and Sciences. The present clock can probably be attributed to the Place des Victoires clockmaker Pierre Claude Raguet (d.1810), who succeeded to the workshops of his father-in-law Jean-Antoine Lépine (d.1814) in 1784, whereafter he signed his clocks 'Lépine' and began numbering them from No. 4000. He was later appointed 'Horloger' to Empress Josephine.