The Enseigne mystery clocks take their name and form from the decorative fire-screen panels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. "Enseigne" refers to these ornamental screens; the clocks echo their shape, with a decorative frame enclosing the crystal dial. They are also called Screen mystery clocks.
Production
Seven Enseigne clocks were produced between 1923 and 1928, all in the workshop of Maurice Couët. This places them in the same concentrated period of Art Deco production as the Portique clocks (1923--1925), during which Cartier's decorative clockmaking reached its most ambitious phase.
Design and Materials
The form is a flat panel with decorative borders enclosing a transparent rock crystal disc on which the hands appear to float. Each is raised on a rectangular black onyx base. The overall effect is more two-dimensional than the columnar Model A or the architectural Portique, giving the Screen clock a distinct character: less sculptural, more like a framed picture that happens to tell the time.
As Harry Fane catalogued, five of the seven are decorated with coral batons, one with jade batons, and the seventh, which is fractionally larger than the others, with subtle batons of moonstone. An eighth model can justifiably be added to this group: a red lacquer and gold clock which forms the central element of a desk set, made in 1925, which included two Chinese agate inkwells. The Screen design was also used for a number of non-mysterious clocks.
Sources
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 281, 282 et al.
- Harry Fane, The Mystery of Time: The Mystery Clocks of Cartier (loan exhibition catalogue, International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show, New York, 2000)
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 5 ("Stones Paris: Early 1920s")
