French Directoire pendule, Le Portefaix, ca. 1800

Movement
The movement has an eight-day going train with an anchor escapement. The striking train with countwheel sounds the hours fully and half hours with a single strike.

Case
The mantel clock stands upon an oval base with flattened ball feet. The front of the base is decorated with two crossed and tied palm fronds. Between them stretches a rope upon which balances a monkey. The palm fronds are flanked by two baskets with handles. Each basket is hung from a bow and has two birds of paradise perched on its sides.

The movement is housed within a gilt bronze case in the shape of a large bale of cotton being carried in a frame on the back of a striding fieldworker with a bamboo walking stick and a small book in his other hand. On his left hip is a drinking flask suspended from a thin cord that passes over his right shoulder. The labourer is wearing nothing other than trousers and a hat.

Exoticism
This mantel clock is a testament to people’s fascination with the exotic in general. Where the Far East (China, Japan, India) had been the prime target of this fascination in the early eighteenth century, its focus shifted to Africa and America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was further fuelled by the publication of various novels (Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in 1787 and Atala by Chateaubriand in 1801) and, in particular, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, which had been published in 1755. The authors of these works painted an idealised portrait of “le bon sauvage”, the noble savage - primitive people who had not yet been corrupted by “civilisation”, and instead were good in essence and by nature. Literature was not the only influence, though; the decree abolishing slavery that had been passed in 1793 in France had an effect as well.