harles X Gilt Bronze Mantel Clock — Joseph Guillet à Grenoble

A rare and iconographically Charles X gilt bronze mantel clock of eight-day duration, the white enamel dial signed Joseph Guillet à Grenoble with Roman and Arabic numerals and fine gilt brass hands. The movement with silk thread suspension, anchor escapement and outside count wheel, striking the hours and half-hours on a bell.

Circa 1825, Paris

The case is conceived as a fauteuil en gondola — a gondola-back armchair with sabre legs and swan-headed arm rests — in which stands a young winged Cupid dressed in a Capuchin friar's habit and hood, holding aloft a flaming heart as if delivering a sermon. Before him kneels a young woman in a long dress and veil, her gaze directed toward an ecclesiastical stand on which rests an open book — not a prayer book, but Ovid's Ars Amatoria, the classical treatise on the art of love. A tall stand beside her supports a hanging lamp. The composition plays with deliberate wit on the tension between sacred and profane love, casting Cupid as confessor and his devotee as penitent.

The rectangular, octagonally-moulded base is cast at centre with a relief of a winged cherub holding a rose on which a butterfly perches — the butterfly a symbol of Psyche, beloved of Cupid and emblem of the soul — while his other hand holds chains, an allusion to earthly desire. Foliate scrolls, stylised vase mounts to the angles and wreaths to either end complete the composition; the whole raised on toupie feet.

The fauteuil en gondola form finds close parallel with the set of four chairs supplied by Jacob-Desmalter for Joséphine Bonaparte's boudoir at Malmaison, made to a design by Charles Percier (illustrated in Ledoux-Lebard, Le Mobilier Français du XIXe Siècle, 2000, p. 335).

Joseph Guillet (d. 1840) is recorded in the Annuaire Statistique de la Cour Royale de Grenoble of 1839 as a horloger established at Grand rue no. 8, Grenoble. His son Jean-Joseph Guillet (1804–1845) also followed the trade.

Height 39 cm — Width 32 cm — Depth 9.5 cm

Literature
— Denise Ledoux-Lebard, Le Mobilier Français du XIXe Siècle, Les Editions de l'Amateur, Paris, 2000, p. 335 (for the Jacob-Desmalter fauteuils en gondola supplied for Joséphine Bonaparte's boudoir at Malmaison, after a design by Charles Percier)
— Annuaire Statistique de la Cour Royale de Grenoble et du Département de l'Isère, Grenoble, 1839 (recording Joseph Guillet, horloger, Grand rue no. 8, Grenoble)
— Tardy, Dictionnaire des Horlogers Français, Paris (Guillet not listed)
— G. H. Baillie, Watchmakers and Clockmakers of the World, London (Guillet not listed)