Design for a Clock

Design for a Clock

Anonymous, French, 18th century

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This drawing of a small porcelain mantel clock was made for Prince Albert Casimir, Duke of Teschen. When he was appointed governor to the Austrian Netherlands in 1781 he had a new palace built in the city of Brussels. He ordered drawings of the finest examples of Parisian furniture, to decide how best to furnish his new residence. This particular drawing is part of that group and reproduces a Sèvres porcelain clock, which must have been a very popular model at the time. Marie-Antoinette had a version in blue in her apartments at the castle of Versailles, and a similar example with a mechanism by the Master Clockmaker Charles Dutertre is kept in the department of European Sculpture and Decorative Art of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A version in green is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and a lighter blue variant is known in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The different colors indicate that the model could likely be customized to fit the client’s preferences. This is also apparent from the oval medallion, held up by the female figure on top of the column, which is still attached in the clocks from Boston and Philadelphia and each display a different content.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.