Charles Motte - Sketch of a French Empire style clock. Summer

Watercolour and gouache over lithographic line, on laid paper. Inscribed: J. B. A. / Imprie Lithoque de C Motte rue des Marais Fg. St. Gn. Numbered: 20. Dimensions: 68 cm. by 50.4 cm.

To be executed in gilt bronze; silvered metal dial; black marble platform.

The clock dial within a sheaf of corn standing against a quoined building flanked by a flail and winnowing basket to the right and the other side with the goddess Ceres, her upraised arm holding a sickle; the base with a central relief scene of ploughing between trophies of agricultural implements.

The fruits of summer are here an allegory for the benefit Louis XVIII regarded as flowing from his reign. Ceres (Demeter in Greek) was the goddess of agriculture, and a bound sheaf of corn stands for the strength that stems from Concord. Indeed Louis XVIII saw himself as a unifying king following the strife of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, repeatedly referring in his speeches to the artistic and commercial (even industrial) flowering that his regime was engendering. Ceres had sometimes been worshiped as an earth-mother, the prime source of fertility, which in the present context may be taken as a flourishing economy and the agricultural implements of flail and winnowing basket vital to bring in the produce of the harvest as alluding to the tools for France’s increasing industrialization, a process of which Louis was well aware.