Gilded Porcelain Vase-shaped Clock, Early 19th Century

An interesting gilded porcelain vase-shaped clock, signed "Normant à Paris", decorated on the rim with fluting enhanced with foliage and small pearls with a band decorated with alternating acanthus leaves and small flowers topped with shells at the bottom. It has two small unicorn-shaped handles. Enamel dial with Roman numerals, Breguet steel hands, indicating the hours, quarter hours and minutes. Three-legged base. Movement revised in working order. Under the Empire and the Restoration, the borne clock, straight or rounded at the top, in bronze, marble, porphyry or decorated with porcelain plaques appears in all the simplicity of its form, without scrolled consoles like its Louis XVI ancestors. Its ornamentation is also much more sober and rigorous. The portico clocks have the same architectural and decorative rigor as the terminals with columns or pilasters supporting a horizontal entablature, more rarely a pediment. Finally, the vase-shaped clocks play ingeniously with contrasts of materials and colors, often combining gilded bronze and patinated bronze or white and gilded porcelain. The dial is inscribed in the vase and the handles can take various aspects: winged figures, swan necks, ram's heads, chimeras or unicorns as in the case of our clock. Many clocks of this type are made of porcelain, mostly from Sèvres or Paris.
Bibliography: Pierre Kjellberg, Encyclopédie de la pendule française du Moyen Age au XX° siècle, Paris, Les Éditions de l'Amateur, 1997, pp. 368-372.
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