Western Daily Press (Saturday)
18th-century star Clara could see clock fetch £150k at auction
AN opulent French musical clock commemorating an internationally famous rhinoceros may fetch up to £150,000 when it goes under the hammer at a Dorset auction.
The important Louis XV giltbronze-mounted timepiece, pictured right, is carried on the back of a bronze sculpture of Clara, an Indian rhinoceros that wowed the crowned heads of Europe during a 17-year tour of the continent in the mid-18th century. Clara herself stands on a green horn and patinated bronze musical box.
A fleur de lys stamp on the clock may indicate a royal ownership or inventory mark.
When Clara arrived in Rotterdam from Bengal in 1741 she was only the fifth rhinoceros ever to have been seen in Europe, and she started a craze for rhinoceros-themed fashions and products.
They ranged from prints and poems to plates and ribbons. Women even arranged their hair or wore wigs “a la rhinoceros”.
Clara was only a month old when she fell into the hands of humans.
In 1738 her mother was killed by Indian hunters and she was adopted by Jan Albert Sichterman, a director of the Bengal region of the Dutch East India Company.
Two years later Sichterman sold or gave her to Douwe Mout van der Meer, a Dutch East India Company sea captain, who was her agent, and companion, for the rest of her life.
Van der Meer took Clara to Rotterdam and immediately began to exhibit her.
She was such a hit that he retired from the sea to take her on an international tour which lasted for the rest of her life.
Clara travelled by sea, or in a specially designed cart which needed eight oxen or 10 horses to pull it.
Her diet was said to include 25lbs of hay each day, as well as loaves of bread. She was said to have also developed a taste for ale after being given the drink by some of the sailors on her journey from Bengal.
She stayed in Paris for five months and made a guest appearance at the royal menagerie at Versailles, where she had an audience with King Louis
XV. The fashionable world could not get enough of her and letters, poems and songs were composed in her honour. In her travels from Denmark to Naples and Paris to Poland she met the Kings of Prussia and Poland, Empress Maria Theresa and the British royal family.
She visited palaces and castles, but with thousands of ordinary folk happy to queue up to view the wonder from the east she was also exhibited in much humbler places.
Clara’s last appearance was just such a setting, a tent at the Horse and Groom public house in Lambeth. It was there that she died in 1758, aged 20.
The clock for sale at Duke’s of Dorchester’s spring fine art auction on Thursday, April 28 is the property of a “Lady of Title”.
When it was sold by Christie’s New York in 1996 it was said to be the property of a European noble family. Duke’s estimates a hammer price of £100,00-£150,000. A clock of the same type is in the collection of The Louvre in Paris.