Attribué à Jehan Bernard Duseigneur dit Jehan... Lot n° 38

Bronze clock with brown-green patina, the circular dial with Roman numerals inscribed in the rocky base on which stands the group in the round of Hercules and Lichas after Antonio Canova. Bronze with brown-green patina Circa 1830 H : 64 - W : 40 - D : 27 cm The subject crowning our clock is borrowed from Greek mythology. Lichas brought to Hercules, on behalf of Dejanira, the tunic which she believed to contain a powerful potion and which was stained with the blood of the centaur Nessus. Having put it on, Hercules felt his body being consumed, seized the unfortunate Lichas and threw him into the sea of Euboea, where he was changed into a rock. The subject is interpreted by Antonio Canova in a group preserved in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and made in marble between 1795 and 1815. By the choice of the subject, its execution and by stylistic comparison, the clock we are presenting can be attributed to Jehan Duseigneur His work is characteristic of the romantic movement. His figures, with their heroic nudity and muscularity, express power but also destructive fury or the violence of despair, as in the Roland furieux, exhibited at the 1831 Salon. We find this strength and tension in the group crowning our clock. Moreover, another clock by Duseigneur, titled Saint Michel conqueror of Satan, kept in the Louvre Museum, offers a parallel and a counterpart to the work we present. The Louvre Clock is a scale model of a plaster group sent by the artist to the 1834 Salon and then to the 1851 Exposition Universelle. The numerous engravings made after the exhibition of the plaster show that the imposing rock on which the protagonists are standing did not exist originally. Most likely added by the artist when transforming his original model into a clock, this base in the form of protruding rocks is identical in every respect to that of our clock, including the frame of the dial in the form of a coiled snake. We also find the thinner snake under the dial. The similarity between the bases of these clocks is described in Nouvelles acquisitions du département des Objets d'art 1990-1994: the same rock base was used to transform, also into a clock, a sculpted group of completely different inspiration, which, at first glance, did not lend itself to such an adaptation any more than the work of Duseigneur. It is a bronze reduction of a group by Canova, Hercules and Lykas, of which it is known that at the time of our clock, bronze reductions from a sketch were circulating in large numbers in Paris. Bibliography Musée du Louvre. New acquisitions of the Department of Works of Art 1990-1994. 1995