Negress head clock

The Marquess of Worcester, for instance, patented the device in 1661, the same year Grollier de Serviere began producing the timepiece.

The clock is mentioned in an entry on 4 July 1784 in the anonymous Mémoires secrets that detailed daily life in late 18th-century Paris.

The poem is about the clock and a child playing the song "Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre" ("Marlborough Has Left for the War") for his late father.

[2] It is in the form of a bust of an African woman; she wears a turban and aigrette, and a draped tunic that has a 'garland of flowers and foliage'.

The box plays eight tunes, of which half, all contemporaneous French songs, have been identified: The person depicted is a black woman intended as a personification of the continent of Africa.

The Hillwood Museum describes the allegorical woman of 'Africa', very often one of a set of the "Four Continents", as being historically depicted as "a Moorish woman (dark-skinned Muslim from Northern Africa), partially nude, wearing an elephant-head crest, coral necklace, and pendant earrings, holding a scorpion and cornucopia full of grain, while surrounded by a fierce lion and poisonous snakes".

[10] The example in the Royal Collection of the United Kingdom was made by Jean-Antoine Lépine in 1790 and is displayed in the music room at Windsor Castle.

The clock was catalogued in the Pictorial Inventory of 1827–1833 that was drawn up as a record of decorative items from Carlton House and other royal residences for the refurbishment of Windsor Castle.

The New Yorker magazine, in describing the clock, wrote that "The lady rather gruesomely tells the hour with her right eye and the minute with her left".

[4] The example in a private collection is the clock that was presented at the Tuileries Palace to the Dauphin of France, Louis, in 1792 as a gift to mark the New Year.

[12] It had been bought by the Intendant and Comptroller General of the Royal Garde-Meuble, Baron Marc-Antoine Thierry de Ville-d'Avray, for 4,000 livres from Furet in the summer of 1784.

[12] At the time of its 1956 attribution the clock in the British royal collection had been believed to have been given by Louis XVI to Marie Antoinette.