The Portique Clock stands apart from every other form Cartier produced: six examples made across a two-year period in the early 1920s, each a miniature architectural monument in gold, onyx, and hardstone. No other Cartier clock type was produced in such limited numbers, and none makes so literal a reference to architecture. The name itself, from the French for portico, signals the intent: these were gateways or temple fronts rendered at tabletop scale.
Form and Materials
The Portique Clock is designed in the style of an oriental doorway, with a massive rock crystal dial suspended from a black enamelled gold lintel, each featuring a distinctive pair of massive crystal columns. Four of the six are identical, with round crystal columns and twelve-sided rock crystal dials. Only the individual oriental figures resting upon the lintel distinguish one model from another. Of the remaining two, one has huge square columns of rose quartz with enamel fou dogs at the base of the columns. The sixth has massive square rock crystal columns and, while also oriental in design, its defining characteristic is the inclusion of Art Deco motifs in jade and diamonds. So successful and complex is the illusion in the Portique clocks that even the keyhole is completely hidden.
The clocks were produced by the workshop of Maurice Couët, the master clockmaker whose collaboration with Cartier was central to the firm's most ambitious horological work. Couët's workshop was established at 53 rue Lafayette in Paris, where Cartier had set up a dedicated clock-making operation in 1919. The technical demands of fitting a functioning movement within a sculptural architectural form of this kind were considerable, and the small total output reflects both the complexity of production and the ambition of the design.
The Portique Clock sits within the broader tradition of Cartier's Art Deco decorative objects, which frequently drew on architectural and geometric sources. Like the other Mystery Clocks, the Portique Clock conceals its movement entirely, with the hands appearing to turn in mid-air within the crystal dial. Its overall character, however, is primarily architectural: where the Model A and Screen clocks are relatively compact display pieces, the Portique presents as a monumental gateway. Each stands over fourteen inches tall, and each pair of rock crystal columns weighs in excess of 5,000 carats. They are, as Harry Fane observed in his 2000 exhibition catalogue The Mystery of Time, certainly the most imposing mystery clocks and far the largest Cartier mystery clocks made.
Six Known Examples
All six Portique Clocks were produced between 1923 and 1925, a window of just two years. One was exhibited at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in 1925, the landmark exhibition that gave Art Deco its retrospective name and at which Cartier was among the most prominent exhibitors.
As of Harry Fane's 2000 catalogue, the Cartier Museum owned one, two were in private American collections, two in private Swiss collections, and the sixth was privately owned but its whereabouts unknown. One example is recorded as having been owned by Ganna Walska, the Polish-born opera singer and horticulturalist; in 1965, her estate sold her Portique for a mere $1,800.
Portique Clock No. 3 sold at Phillips Geneva in May 2025 for CHF 3,932,000.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 5 ("Stones Paris: Early 1920s")
- Harry Fane, The Mystery of Time: The Mystery Clocks of Cartier (loan exhibition catalogue, International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show, New York, 2000)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007)
- Phillips Geneva, May 2025, Portique Clock No. 3 (CHF 3,932,000)
