Manière, Merlet et Thomire - An important gilt-bronze mantel regulator

An important gilt-bronze and Portor marble mantel regulator of two weeks duration with movement by Charles-Guillaume Hautemanière, known as Manière.
The white enamel dial, with Roman numerals for the hours, Arabic numerals for the quarter and a pier of pierced gilt brass hands for the hours and minutes, is signed Maniere à Paris and shows the mark G Merlet of Georges-Adrien Merlet (1754 -1812), who was with Joseph Coteau (1740-1801) and Etienne Gobin, known as Dubuisson (1731-1815) one of the three leading painters of dials and enamelled clocks during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The movement with anchor escapement, striking on the hour and half our on a single bell, with outside count wheel was made by the esteemed Parisian horloger Charles-Guillaume Hautemanière, known as Manière, master in 1778, who won a huge success from the beginning of his career by working extensively for the marchand-mercier Dominique Daguerre, for whom he supplied works valued at the substantial sum of 920,000 livres between 1778-92. Suspension and gridiron pendulum modified during 19th century.
The case with circular dial set within a gilt bronze and glass cage is attributed to the bronzier Thomire, who supplied most of Maniere clock cases. Maniere is known to have always used cases by leading bronziers such as Jean-Baptiste Osmond, Pierre-Philippe Thomire, François Rémond, François Vion, Edme Roy and Claude Galle.
His clocks were regarded as much as for their mechanical excellence as for their aesthetic value of which examples can be found in many public collections including the Châteaux de Fontainebleau and Versailles, in Paris at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Musée Nissim de Camondo as well as the Patrimonio Nacional in Madrid. In addition, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome and Palazzo Reale in Turin, as well as the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg and Woburn Abbey, Woodstock, Oxfordshire also own examples from his outstanding oeuvre.
Manière was first established at rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré (1778), then he moved to rue des Prouvaires (1781) and by 1789 to rue Mercier. He later moved to rue Christine, 1806 and four years later was recorded at rue Bertin-Poirée.