Design for a Clock

Anonymous, French

Pen and black and brown ink, brush and yellow, green, gray, and rose wash

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This refined decorative drawing depicts a design for a small porcelain mantel clock, rendered in pen and black and brown ink with brush washes of yellow, green, gray, and rose. The composition features a columnar form surmounted by a female figure holding an oval medallion, characteristic of the elegant Neoclassical taste that dominated French luxury design in the final decades of the eighteenth century. The drawing was made for Prince Albert Casimir, Duke of Teschen, who commissioned records of the finest Parisian furnishings as he prepared to decorate his new palace in Brussels upon his appointment as governor of the Austrian Netherlands in 1781. The clock design reproduces a celebrated Sèvres porcelain model that enjoyed wide aristocratic patronage, with versions known to have belonged to Marie-Antoinette at Versailles and to several major museum collections.