Watercolor and gouache over lithographic line, on paper. Inscribed: j. B. A. / imprie lithoque de c motte rue des marais fg. St. Gn. Numbered: 16. Dimensions: 68 cm. By 50. 4 cm. To be executed in gilt bronze and rouge marble; silvered metal dial; black marble platform. The youthful god, holding the thyrsus staff and raising a wine cup, aside an altar topped by a ewer and syrinx and fronted by the clock with a reclining bacchante mount below the dial; the frieze with a hunting horn and cornucopiae within acanthus scrolls. Bacchic imagery was appropriate for dining room clocks. Here the god is shown with his thyrsus, a staff topped by a pinecone (a symbol of fertility) and entwined with ivy, sacred to bacchus. His retinue comprised pan, whose attributes were the syrinx (or panpipes, a graduated row of tubes bound together) and the horn trumpet, a phallic symbol supposed to promote fertility. Date: between 1815 and 1820..
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