Porcelain Mantel Clock in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2008

Mantel Clock
Case: hard-paste and soft-paste porcelain, with gilded-bronze mounts
Dial: white enamel, with blue numerals; signed
Gudin-le Jeune/AParis
Movement: verge escapement with short pendulum and count-wheel striking; signed (on the back plate) Gudin le Jeune AParis [Paul Gudin, called Gudin le Jeune (recorded 1739, d. ca. 1755)]
French (Paris) ca. 1750

Accession # 1974.356.411

Parisian guilds placed severe restrictions on the use of materials that could be incorporated in a clockcase. By the middle of the eighteenth century these rules were being circumvented by a class of entrepreneurs, known as marchand-merciers, who were able to obtain parts from various sources that could be combined in a single object. One of the most successful marchand-merciers was Lazare Duvaux, who held the title of merchant-jeweler to the French king from 1748 to 1758. Gudin le Jeune was among the clockmakers who supplied movements for clocks of this variety, and there is at least one payment in Duvaux's records from Gudin in 1753 for a Meissen porcelain group. It is not the group found on this clock, however, which has a complicated history of its own; it is composed of a group called the Hand Kiss and a separate figure titled Shindler, the Huzzar of Count Heinrich von Bruhl. Both porcelains were modeled at Meissen by Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706-1775) between 1735 and 1737, and the Hand Kiss appeared in several versions, one in which a tea table replaces the cavalier. On this clock the porcelain group is mounted on an exuberantly rococo French gilded-bronze that also supports the stem of a bush laden with flowers (made about 1745-49) at the French porcelain manufactory at Vincennes) encircling the dial of the clock. Peeping from the underbrush at the twelve o'clock position is a porcelain cat with a dead bird.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art label.