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.
