Wall clock

A cartel clock hangs on the wall from a single point, so the case carries the movement and the movement carries nothing. Everything below the hook is dead weight worked into ornament: the scrolls that look like foliage are the structure, and the plate they are modelled on is what the movement is screwed to.

The case is soft-paste porcelain, which is the difficult way to do it. Soft-paste is fired low, slumps where the wall is thick and comes out of the kiln a size nobody can predict to the millimetre, so a case in this material cannot be made to a drawing and then filled. The mounts take up the difference, and the dial sits in whatever aperture the fired case turned out to have.

The date here is the movement’s. Etienne LeNoir signed it and the catalogue follows the signature, as it does everywhere in this section; the case is contemporary with it on the evidence of the modelling alone, which is a weaker claim and is meant to read as one.