Date: about 1726
Maker: cabinetwork attributed to André-Charles Boulle (1642–1732) and workshop, Father Time model by François Girardon (1628–1715), after Pordenone (about 1484–1539), movement by Claude III Martinot (died 1744)
Materials: oak, conifer, rosewood, ebony, turtleshell, brass, gilt bronze, steel and glass
Measurements: 89.8 x 56.2 x 23.7 cm
Inv. no. F41
Having trained early in his career as a sculptor, Boulle later looked to incorporate the medium into his furniture designs.
He amassed a collection of Renaissance and contemporary sculpture, which he displayed, alongside his own models, in a workshop gallery for inspiration.
Although largely lost in a fire in 1720, fragments of these have since been unearthed by archaeologists excavating the former workshop site in the Cour Napoléon, now at the centre of the Musée du Louvre.
Boulle is known to have worked particularly closely with Louis XIV’s official sculptor, Girardon, whose workshop was also in the Louvre and his daughter was godmother to one of the cabinetmaker’s children.
He created the model for Father Time on this clock, the design for which, like an earlier version (F43 and F52) in the museum, was first devised around 1690–1700 for the king’s controller-general of finances.
Under the gaze of Love, Father Time laments the passing hours, holding a foliot – the device that regulates clock movements and once heralded the dawn of mechanical timekeeping.
The distinctive figure traces its origin to a lost fresco painted by Pordenone on the Palazzo d’Anna in Venice during the 16th century, now preserved only in a sketch.
It later found its way to Paris through prints and likely informed Girardon’s sculpture of Saturn made for the gardens of Versailles in the 1670s, before he went on to create the Father Time model for Boulle.
The clock’s movement is engraved with the date 1726 and the name of its maker, Martinot. A distinguished royal horologist and the grandson of Girardon, Martinot inherited a workshop in the Louvre from his father.
This became a highly successful enterprise, and he often supplied movements for Boulle cases.
The year after he supplied the movement for the Wallace clock, he created an ingenious astronomical timepiece that gave both true and mean time, which was later owned by Charles-Antoine Coypel (1694–1752), painter to the king and director of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.
Martinot was also an accomplished artist, a passionate bibliophile and an astute print dealer, who even reused plates from series illustrating Girardon’s renowned collection of sculpture and antiquities.
Probably acquired by the 4th Marquess of Hertford in France, the clock was first recorded in the Grande galerie of his apartment at 2 rue Laffitte in an inventory made in 1871 following his death.
The lower section of the plinth is a 19th-century addition decorated in contre-partie marquetry with a different quality and appearance from the rest of the piece.
The première-partie marquetry running across the top of the clock’s case has a distinctly organic, almost Rococo, quality, which might suggest it was produced by one of Boulle’s sons, who had taken over the workshop during their father’s later career.