A Louis XVI Style Gilt-Bronze and Wedgwood Porcelain Cartel Clock and Companion Barometer

Description

A Louis XVI Style Gilt-Bronze and Wedgwood Porcelain Cartel Clock and Companion Barometer, by Maison Millet, Paris, after the model attributed to Pierre Gouthière.

The clock dial is signed ‘Robin,’ and the barometer dial is signed ‘Radiguet / A PARIS.’ The gilt-bronze is stamped ‘MB’ for Maison Millet.

The present cartel clock and matching barometer are based on a model attributed to the bronzier Pierre-Joseph-Désiré Gouthière (d. 1813), originally from the Château de Saint-Cloud and now part of the permanent collection at the Musée du Louvre (OA 5493 and OA 5494).

French, Circa 1880.

In the second half of the 19th century, furniture and works of art, once the preserve of the aristocracy and often literally made for royalty, were transferred, often through war and revolution, to state museum collections, many via pioneering private collectors. Before this time, there were very few museums.

Gouthière, Pierre Carcany, Musée du Louvre, Département des Objets d’art du Moyen Age, de la Renaissance et des temps modernes, OA 5494 – https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010098663 – https://collections.louvre.fr/CGU

The examples in the Louvre (shown in an old black and white photograph), attributed to the bronzier Pierre Gouthière and the horloger Carcany, were made circa 1785 for a member of Louis XVI’s court, very possibly for Queen Marie Antoinette herself. By the mid-19th century, they were at the Château de Saint-Cloud, perhaps in the Salon of Empress Eugenie. With the fall of the Second Empire, they were transferred to the Musée du Louvre, where they were properly documented, photographed, published, and exhibited.

The fashion for the Ancien Régime and ‘tous les Louis’ drove a new breed of collectors, such as Sir Richard Wallace and Henry Clay Frick. Public exhibitions of royal furniture and works of art gave contemporary makers the opportunity to examine these masterpieces up close for the first time. Makers competed to produce the most magnificent replicas, and versions of these clocks and barometers were exactingly made during the late 19th century. The originals are priceless, and the most prized replicas, both then and now, were made by Beurdeley, Dasson, and as here Millet.