The dial with a Roman chapter ring, at the front of a flaming triangular altar with a ram's head atop each angle, those on the front draped with ribbon-tied garlands curved beneath the bezel, on sphinx feet, flanked by a Vestal and a hound seated at a stump, on a rectangular base inset with billing doves on laurel branches, on toupie feet
15¹⁄₄ in. (39 cm.) high, 13 in. (33.5 cm.) wide

Anonymous sale; Christie's, New York, 24 May 2000, lot 324.

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Lot Essay

With its sphinx-supported altar with ram's-headed canted angles inspired by the designs of the architect Jean-Demosthène Dugourc, this clock is closely related to the oeuvre of the ciseleur-doreur Pierre-Philippe Thomire (maître in 1772). An ormolu and rouge griotte marble clock attributed to Thomire and set with a virtually-identical antique altar is illustrated in P. Kjellberg, La Pendule française du Moyen Age au XXe siècle, Paris, 1997, p. 336, fig. c.

The latter was responsible for the Pendule à Porteurs supplied by the horloger Robin in 1788 for the Cabinet des Bains of Marie-Antoinette at the Palais des Tuileries, which displays a related altar of form carried by two priestesses of Vesta. This clock is now preserved at the musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (ibid., p. 266) and another example of it, executed in rouge griotte akin to the present lot, is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (obj. no. 2015.64). A pair of candelabra with similar altar-form bases in Sèvres porcelain, signed Thomire doreur à Paris 1791, are now in the Royal Collection in Madrid (illustrated in P. Verlet, Les Bronzes Dorés Français du XVIIIe Siècle, Paris, 1989, p. 47, pl. 41).