THE DIAL SIGNED BOUCHET, THE PLINTH ENGRAVED HAURE, CIRCA 1775

Inscribed The Immortal Genius survives throughout the Ages and Time, without fear, contemplating the devastation, this highly-sculptural clock is the product of the collaboration between two illustrious figures of the art of clockmaking in eighteenth-century France; Jean Hauré and Jean-Louis Bouchet. Hauré was a member of the Académie de St. Luc and became a maître-fondeur supplying furniture and ormolu objets d'art for the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne from 1785-88. Serving as Entrepreneur des Meubles de la Couronne from 1784 to 1791, he supervised furniture purchases of the Crown and the Garde-Meuble, including a pair of chairs by Boulard for Louis XVI's Salon des Jeux, sold Christie's, Paris, 21 November 2023, lot 5 (€239,400); a commode by Benneman for Madame Thierry de Ville d'Avray's bedroom in the Hôtel du Garde-Meuble and subsequently sent to Louis XVI's Cabinet du Conseil at the Tuileries Palace on May 15, 1792, sold Christie's, New York, 21 October 1997, lot 282 ($937,500); and a pair of figural chenets probably designed by Hauré himself, used in the Grand Cabinet of the Salon des Nobles de la Reine at Versailles. Having originally trained under Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne, he was passionate about sculpture and he is recorded having shown figural clock case designs at an exhibition of the Académie at the Hôtel Jabach in1774 and at another Salon in 1791. Bouchet learned his skills from the horlogers Pierre Gille l'aîné and Antoine-Charles Caron. Having been received maître in 1762, he was appointed to maintain the clocks at the Château Bellevue for Louis XV in 1766. He was probably one of the first clockmakers of the period to make skeleton clocks with different dials and in 1766 he delivered such a clock to Louis XV: pendule composée de différents mouvements ronds dans une boëte de cristal pour en laisser distinguer les différents ressorts.
The sale of the collection of the late and Right Honorable The Lord Wharton, in which this clock first appeared in the twentieth century, featured a number of important pieces of eighteenth-century ébénisterie and menuiserie, some with French royal provenance. Highlights of the sale included a commode formerly in the collection of the Earl of Coventry and a magnificent secrétaire à abattant, both by R.V.L.C, and a commode by Benneman from Marie Antoinette's Salon des Nobles at Saint-Cloud, lots 98, 100 and 101, respectively.