Exoticism was greatly en vogue at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, as evidenced not only in the famed literature on distant lands and concepts of the 'other', epitomized by Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre and Chateaubriand, but also in the applied arts, embodied by a series of clocks inspired by the same literature. This clock celebrates the continent of America as the allegorical figure of L'Amérique, after a design signed and dated No.12 Deverberie due trois Pluviose an Sept (1799), preserved in the cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothque Nationale, Paris (H. Ottomeyer, P. Pörschel et al., Vergoldete Bronzen, Münich, 1986, vol. I, p. 381, fig. 5.15.28). The design is inscribed by the Parisian clock-maker and marchand mercier De Verberie. De Verberie, who in 1804 had a shop at the Boulevard du Temple, sold clocks representing a series of the Continents. A clock of the same model, in the Musée Paul Dupuy, Toulouse, is illustrated in Tardy, La Pendule Française, Paris, 1967-69, vol. II, p. 357, and another example, from the collection of the late Michael Behrens, was sold Christie's, London, 11 June 1998, lot 58.