Empire clock. France, c. 1810

Empire clock. France, c. 1810
Mercury gilt bronze and enameled porcelain. Hand-painted porcelain dial, enameled.
With pendulum suspension on silk thread.
Signed "Mme Gentilhomme / Palais Royal à Paris / C.P." (Louise Admirat: 1759-Paris 1829).
Preserves pendulum and key
Presents chiming mechanism on wooden stand
Measurements: 49 x 37 x 16 cm; 7.5 x 46 x 22 cm.

French gilded bronze clock of the 19th century. This clock presents a mythological figure of Hercules inspired by the famous sculpture of Hercules Farnese. The clock, known in several versions with minor variations is inspired by the Farnese Hercules, well known in France for the casts made for kings and academies both in Rome and Paris. Above all, a life-size copy had been placed by the architect Le Notre in the garden of Vaux-le-Vicomte (the castle that Nicolas Fouquet, minister of Louis XIV, had had built in 1654).

However, this gilded bronze sculpture only echoes the Farnese Hercules in the pensive aspect of the hero and in an identical posture of the legs; Hercules leans on the club with his right hand, while with his left, resting on a large tree trunk, he would originally hold the three golden apples. In the Farnese sculpture, on the other hand, the right hand is turned towards the back and the left hand hangs along the club and the lion skin on which the hero leans. Moreover, the Farnese Hercules is completely naked, while the clock sculpture, surely as a matter of bourgeois moralism, is wrapped in the lion's skin. This type of iconography, characterized by the club used as a cane, is peculiar to other Herculean images that were not particularly famous in the Restoration era, to which the clock dates back. The clock is adorned with numerous "Herculean" attributes, such as the skin of the lion of Nemea between the bow and arrow and the intertwined serpents that allude to the first exploit of the hero who, while still in the cradle, drowned two serpents sent to him by his eternal enemy Juno.