A Louis Xvi Gilt Bronze Cartel Clock

An extremely fine Louis XVI gilt bronze cartel clock, signed on the dial and on the backplate Frémy à Paris, housed in a magnificent case attributed to Robert Osmond, after a design by Jean-Charles Delafosse, the white enamel dial with an inner Roman hour ring and an outer ring for the Arabic five-minute intervals, with a very fine pair of pierced gilt brass hands for the hours and minutes. The movement with anchor escapement, silk thread suspension, striking on the hour and half hour with outside countwheel. The Neo-classical case surmounted by a drapery-hung urn with angular handles and a pinecone finial resting on a raised dais ornamented with Greek key motifs and Vitruvian scrolls, each of the sides below with an angled husk-trailed pilaster with a fruiting finial and hung with fruiting laurel swags that are gathered at the top of the glazed pendulum viewing aperture, the lower section with four small pinecone finials and a central dentilled fruiting and foliate boss
Paris, date circa 1770-75
Height 80 cm, width 40 cm.
Literature: Svend Eriksen “Early Neo-classicism in France”, 1974, pp. 346-7, pl. 195, illustrating a cartel clock of similar design, with a movement by Bougeois à Paris, in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle. Tardy, “Les Plus Belles Pendules Françaises”, 1994, p. 128, illustrating a clock of very similar design with the addition of a lion head mask below the dial, signed Imbert l’Ainé à Paris. Hans Ottomeyer and Peter Pröschel, “Vergoldete Bronzen”, 1986, p. 182, pl. 3.8.1, illustrating a cartel clock of the same model signed on the dial Gille l’Ainé à Paris, in Schloss Nymphenburg, Munich and p. 182, pl. 3.8.2, illustrating a pen and ink drawing by Jean-Charles Delafosse, housed at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, which shows dual variations for a cartel clock of very similar design. And p. 184, pl. 3.8.8, illustrating a set of four drawings of cartel clock cases in the Bibliothèque Doucet, of which the top right hand one (no. 37) by Robert Osmond is very similar to the present model. Pierre Kjellberg, “Encyclopédie de la Pendule Française du Moyen Age au XXe Siècle”, 1997, p. 191, pl. C, illustrating a cartel of the same design signed on the dial Lacan à Paris. Alastair Laing, Martin Meade, J. W. Niemeijer, Christopher White, Michael Jacobs, Karin Wolfe, Michael Snodin, Geoffrey de Bellaigue, “Catalogue of Drawings for Architecture, Design and Ornament: The James A. de Rothschild Bequest”, 2006; vol. 1, p, 180, cat no. 122, illustrating and discussing in detail the design by Jean-Charles Delafosse, described as ‘a cartel clock in two alternatives’, dated 1770-75 (as also reproduced in Ottomeyer and Pröschel).
With its strict adherence to Neo-classical ornament and in particular the goût-grec, the design for this handsome clock derives from a pen and ink drawing by Jean-Charles Delafosse (b.1734 d. either 1789 or 91). That drawing is one of many designs now in the Waddesdon Museum collection that were purchased by Baron Edmond de Rothschild; in total he purchased about fifty of Delafosse’s drawings in 1878 and 1888. Delafosse’s design shows a cartel clock, divided vertically down the middle to include two alternative ideas. The upper part of the present case is very similar to Delafosse’s right-hand scheme while the angular pilasters surmounted by fruiting finials is based on the left side of his design. Ottomeyer and Pröschel credit Delafosse with the invention of this specific type of clock model. However, as Alastair Laing et al. (op. cit) point out, similar designs for cartel cases also appear on a sheet of drawings by the bronzier Robert Osmond (1711-89, maître 1746), which raises the question as to whether Osmond, rather than Delafosse, created the initial design. As Laing et al note ‘Was Delafosse simply toying with the well-established motifs of an already existing form of cartel? Or was a drawing such as this the point de depart for the bronziers [especially Osmond], from which to make their own more practicable (and not surviving) designs, broken down into a set of separately castable – and differently combinable – pieces?’. The authors remain inconclusive, even though it seems far more feasible that Ottomeyer and Pröschel are correct in crediting Delafosse with the invention of this type of clock case and, by implication, that Robert Osmond’s drawing of a similar cartel was based on existing cases in his workshop. Following on from this argument, we can assume to ascribe the design for the present clock to Delafosse and attribute the maker of the case to Osmond.
Before discussing Delafosse, Osmond and the clockmaker Fremy à Paris, it is worth noting that in addition to the comparison clocks cited under literature (above), other cartels of the same or a near identical model were fitted with movements by equally esteemed Paris clockmakers including Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste Baillon, Edme-Jean Caussard, Adam Léchopié and either Etienne or Xavier Gide, while variations of the model housed movements by Jean-Antoine I Lépine and Jacques Charles Panier. In his book on Neo-classicism, Svend Eriksen (op. cit) connects the design by Jean-Charles Delafosse to a description of one supplied to the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne on 31st December 1770 by a certain Sieur Henry (possibly the master gilder Nicolas Henry).
As a Parisian architect, ornamental designer and engraver, Delafosse played an important role in disseminating Neo-classical ornament and design, especially the style known as the goût antique. Originally apprenticed in 1747 to the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Poullet (d. 1775), he does not seem to have completed his apprenticeship. Rather he concentrated his energies toward becoming a designer and architect. To this effect, by 1767 he styled himself architecte et professeur pour le dessin. An influential and innovative designer, in 1768 Delafosse published the first volume of his most important work, the “Nouvelle Iconologie Historique”, containing a hundred and ten plates, most of which Delafosse engraved himself. Included were designs for furniture, decorative objects and architectural ornament in the heavy classicising Louis XVI style to include, as here, Vitruvian scrolls, Greek key motifs and swags. Up until the mid-1780s, he continued to create numerous designs for trophies, cartouches, furniture, vases and light fittings, which were predominantly issued through the Parisian print seller Chereau.
In addition, Delafosse is known to have designed two houses (1776–83), the Hôtel Titon and the Hôtel Goix both in the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière, Paris. Although they exhibit little structural innovation, their ornamentation reveals characteristic touches such as lions’ heads adorning the main entrance of the Hôtel Titon as well as laurel branches above the doors, classical arabesques friezes between the floor levels in the courtyard and two large classical urns in the vestibule. Appointed assistant professor of geometry and perspective at the Académie de Saint-Luc, Delafosse later became a member of the Académie de Bordeaux (1781), where he exhibited a number of his drawings. In 1789 he joined the Garde National, Paris and is known to have played an active role in the French Revolution.
As noted, the maker of this finely cast and chaste case is attributed to Robert Osmond who, together with his nephew Jean-Baptiste Osmond (1742- after 1790, maître 1764) ran one of the leading Parisian firms of bronziers during the eighteenth century. One of the most prolific as well as one of the most successful fondeurs-ciseleurs of his day, Osmond worked as adeptly in the Louis XV as the Louis XVI style. Valued by connoisseurs today, as much as in his day, his bronzes were widely distributed by clockmakers and the marchand-merciers. He was born in Canisy, near Saint-Lô and having entered his apprenticeship at a late stage became a maître in 1746 and from 1764 until 1775 worked in association with his nephew Jean-Baptiste Osmond. In addition to cartel cases Osmond specialised in column clocks as well as others shaped as vases with lions’ heads. Another of his remarkable clock cases was one decorated with a globe, cupids and a Sèvres porcelain plaque (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Osmond’s work can be found among the world’s finest collections including the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Musée Nissim-de-Camondo in Paris, the Musée Condé at Chantilly, the Nationalmuseet Stockholm and the Museum of Art Cleveland, Ohio.
Whilst there are many Parisian clockmakers named Frémy, the maker of this movement was probably Jean-Baptiste III Fremy (b. circa 1745 d. 1817). He belonged to a dynasty of horlogers, of whom very little has been documented and that which has is confused. However, from researching ancestral records, it appears that Jean-Baptiste Fremy’s grandfather, uncles, father and son were all clockmakers. His grandfather was Jean-Théodore Fremy (d 1733), who was a maître horloger, working in Paris; by 1719 he was established at rue des Boucheries, while toward the end of his life he is merely recorded as living in the parish of Saint Sulpice with his wife Jeanne née Duquellet (or Duquesne). At the time of his death in March 1733, five of their children were still living with their mother, including Jean-Baptiste I (b. c. 1716/7), Nicolas-Julien Fremy (circa 1717/8-1789), Jeanne-Catherine (b. circa 1717), Jean-Baptiste II, who was four at the time of his father’s death and finally Pierre who was only ten months old. Of those five remaining children, it is likely that the three boys became master clockmakers, (confusingly two were called Jean-Baptiste).
Jean-Baptiste III’s parents were Nicolas-Julien Fremy (cited above) and Magdelaine née Bernard (b. circa 1718), daughter of Nicolas Bernard, a master glazier. They were married on 10th January 1741 at St Pierre L’Angelé, Verdun-sur-Meuse, close to Magdelaine’s parents’ home in Meuse. Documentation of their marriage in the church register notes that Nicolas-Julien describes himself as a maître horloger. Just over a month after their wedding, on 12th February 1741, Nicolas-Julien and Magdelaine returned to church to baptize their eldest child, Agnes. Jean-Baptiste III Fremy was born four years later and was to follow his paternal family’s profession. He married Marie-Nicole Laloy on 28th January 1768. In 1793, aged forty-eight, he is recorded in the long established Fremy premises in rue des Mauvais Garçons, along with his wife and son Julien-Nicolas Fremy.
Julien-Nicolas Fremy was born on 14th January 1770 and like his father recorded his profession in 1793 as a clockmaker. On 29th June 1795 he married Anne Petitjean at Meuse. It may be then or shortly after that Julien-Nicolas’s parent Jean-Baptiste III and Marie Nicole moved from rue des Mauvais Garçons to rue Saint Nicolas, no. 12, where Jean-Baptiste spent his last years before his death on the 24th January 1817 at the Hopital de la Pitié in Paris. The Fremy family ancestry is complex and so in this context it is worth noting that Tardy records a Julien-Nicolas Fremy at rue de Tournon in 1744, then at rue de Mauvais Garçons from 1748 up until 1772, after which he was established at Cour de Palais between 1778-83 and finally in 1789 at rue du Marché Neuf. It is assumed that these records refer to both Nicolas-Julien Fremy (b 1717/8) who was the father of Jean-Baptiste III and Julien-Nicolas (b.1770), who was Jean-Baptiste III’s son. Such inconsistencies illustrate the complexities when documenting the Fremy family history.