The United States’ Gilded Age symbolized rapid economic growth and increased industrialization throughout the country. As the name suggests, it also ushered in a public taste for the country’s elite that favored glamorous and excessive design, often reviving historical design motifs and trends. Though created over 100 years after the Gilded Age’s apex, Studio Job’s Robber Barron series—of which the present lot is one of five pieces, each produced as an edition of 5—draws on some of the same conceptual and aesthetic ideas that tycoons such as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Frick now symbolize in today’s public imagination. Formidable in its size and weight, the floor clock is an amalgam of symbols. At the base, the arcades of a Florentine palazzo sit atop a mass of jagged coal, a symbol of the oil industry that skyrocketed in the late 19th century. Above the architectural base are gilded oil barrels, another reference to industry. And the clock itself visually draws on London’s Big Ben and is surrounded by low relief sculptures of symbols such as gas masks, missiles, gears and fumes. And at the top sits a neoclassical mansion resting on what appears to be the golden, dreamy clouds. Or are they fumes of excess? It is this duality—both the rejection and the proselytization of art and industry—that makes the present series endlessly captivating.