Thinking about time can make you despair. In art, it often turns up as a reminder of death. Yet walking into the Wallace Collection’s ravishing display of early 18th-century clocks by André-Charles Boulle, you find out that it can be joyous after all. There are no brooding images of mortality and Judgment day here, just dazzling timepieces that tell you to make love, be happy and face down that ticking destiny.
This small but scintillating show is a time capsule of the Enlightenment and its art style, the Rococo. That may sound like a lot to load on to the clockmaker Boulle, a brilliant craftsman who also made tables, candle stands and whatever else French royalty and nobles desired at his workshop in the Louvre. Yet Boulle and the other ingenious artisans who collaborated with him were interested in philosophy and science – and it shows. At first sight, the glistening decor on a pedestal clock, complete with a golden face, looks fantastic: then you see three decorative cylinders hanging down. Beneath the mythical finery, shows Boulle, rational machinery is concealed. And it’s machinery that still works after 300 years: all the clocks in the show are wound up, ticking and periodically chiming.
In the 17th century, Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum and many clocks were built tall (“grandfather clocks”) so that they could hold the heavy weights on catgut cords. The three tubes on the front of Boulle’s pedestal clock depict that inner mechanism, yet otherwise his creations do everything possible to disguise their functionality in an extravagant world of sensuality and dreams. One is fitted into a vast wardrobe, its doors larded with glittering gold leaves, curlicues, faces, cherubim. Immense in its splendour, its face is flanked by images of Night and Day.
Aristocratic pig? It may seem hard not to see such luxury through the lens of the political revolution that started in France in 1789. Surely these clocks typify the decadent lifestyle of the aristocracy before Robespierre sent them to the guillotine. But the truth is more complex. The beauty of Boulle’s clocks lies in their celebration of reason, optimism and human potential – the ideals of the Enlightenment, which both inspired and succumbed to the French Revolution.
You feel more than awe at their sumptuousness. These decorations have meaning. Boulle repeatedly portrays Father Time, the scythe-toting classically inspired figure symbolising time’s inevitable passing. The Wallace Collection owns one of the most famous paintings of this old man: Nicolas Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time, hung in a complementary themed gallery next to a barometer by Boulle.
Painted nearly a century before Boulle’s clocks, Poussin’s masterpiece shows four figures dancing in a circle, hand in hand, under a storm-threatening sky lit up by the sun’s chariot, while Father Time plays the lyre, his wings grey and hard as a gravestone. Time calls the tune and will literally call time on life’s dance: our bubbles will vanish, the sands will run out.
Boulle’s clocks imagine time very differently. Their figures of Father Time slump down beneath the clock faces, defeated. On top of two clocks, triumphing over Time, is Cupid, god of love – the opposite of a memento mori. Instead of reminding you to prepare for death, the imagery of Boulle’s clocks urges you to enjoy life. The most outrageous clock of all is supported by a nude figure of Cupid’s mother Venus, the love goddess herself, resting her feet on the shell that carried her to the island of Kythera. Time is nothing. It stops for desire.
We are witnessing the birth of the Rococo. Boulle’s over-the-top designs grow out of the 17th-century baroque but without the brooding religiosity of that age. Instead these French fancies promote love, lust and living for the day.
The artist with whom Boulle has most in common is his contemporary Antoine Watteau. Luckily, the Wallace Collection has plenty of Watteau paintings for comparison. A couple of his canvases have been hung in the themed gallery. In one, Fête Galante in a Wooded Landscape, people relax in a woodland, their cares forgotten. Children play, men and women chat in the grass, a statue seems to come to life. Watteau imagines a perfect holiday of rest and love, a paradise picnic, a moment of time suspended.
Boulle’s clocks don’t deny the existence of time as Watteau seems to – how could they? For all their luscious decor their faces are simple, clear, modern, telling time with a claim to real precision. But their symbols tell you not to be afraid. Love and live, they say, and forget the clock. Looking at them, admiring their subtle craft and liberated by their flights of fantasy, you lose track of time entirely.
• At the Wallace Collection, London, until 2 March
