Hooded wall clock with calendar

The most reliable evidence surrounding the introduction of the pendulum clock to England remains an advertisement found in the London Mercurius Politicus and posted by Ahasuerus I Fromanteel (1607–1693) dated October 21–28, 1658. In the announcement he states that

there is lately a way found out for making of Clocks that go exact and keep equaller time than any now made without this Regulater. . . . Made by Ahasuerus Fromanteel, who made the first that were in England: You may have them at his house on the Bank-side in Mosses Alley, Southwark, and at the sign of the Maremaid in Loathbury, near Bartholomew Lane end London.[1]




There has been considerable speculation about whether it is possible that English clockmakers, and Fromanteel in particular, had experimented with applications of the pendulum to clockwork before the end of 1656, when the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) announced the invention that would revolutionize clockmaking. The invention was published in Latin in a small book titled Horologium (1658),[2] but Huygens was a scientist, not a clockmaker. Therefore, it was the Dutch clockmaker Salomon Coster (died 1659), working in The Hague, who was granted the patent on June 16, 1657, by the States General of the Netherlands to make the newly invented pendulum clocks. The right to make clocks incorporating Huygens’s invention and to sell them in the Dutch Provinces of Holland, West-Friesland, and Zeeland was to be exclusively Coster’s. Thus, it was to the workshop of Coster and not to the aristocratic Huygens that Fromanteel sent his son John to learn the technology of pendulum clocks.[3]



Fromanteel was born in Norwich, England, to a family of Flemish extraction. He was apprenticed to Jacques van Barton, a clockmaker in Norwich, but moved to London, where he was made free of the Blacksmiths’ Company in 1630, and subsequently became a brother in the newly chartered Clockmakers’ Company in 1632.[4] In 1646 Fromanteel left the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, in London, to become an Anabaptist. His religious conversion, together with evidence that he was bilingual in English and Dutch, may partly explain why Fromanteel was quickly able to form a productive relationship with Coster, who was also an Anabaptist.[5] Eventually Coster employed Fromanteel’s son as a journeyman in his workshop from September 1657 until May 1658, and at this time, John Fromanteel learned to make the pendulum clocks that would become a great success in England.[6] Perhaps Ahasuerus I Fromanteel found Restoration England a less-than-comfortable society for Anabaptists, but for whatever reason, in 1667, he left England for the Netherlands, where he remained for the next ten years, spending part of this time in The Hague.[7] Fromanteel returned to England in 1677, and died in 1693. Meanwhile, John Fromanteel (1638–1692), who had been made free of the Clockmakers’ Company in 1663, continued the London business during his father’s absence.



The eight-day, weight-driven movement of the Museum’s clock is a type more often used by the Fromanteels in longcase clocks in the 1660s. It has two narrow brass plates shaped at the top and held apart by five turned pillars that are latched to the front plate. It contains a going train of four wheels with a verge escapement that is regulated by a short pendulum attached directly to a verge staff. The striking train has four wheels and a fly. A count wheel for hour striking is mounted on the back plate, its indexing arm slotted through the plate. The hours are struck on a bell that is mounted on the front plate, where the hammer is also mounted. A bolt-and-shutter device provides continuity of power while the clock is being wound.



The dial is classic Fromanteel, consisting of a gilded square plate to which a narrow chapter ring of silvered brass is attached. The spandrels are filled with applied winged cherub-head reliefs.[8] The chapter ring registers hours (I–XII) and minutes (5–60, each minute marked by a line and every fifth minute by a number). Half hours are indicated by fleurs-de-lis. An aperture at the six o’clock position reveals the day of the month. Two holes for winding (closed between windings) are the only other interruptions on the finely matted surface of the center of the dial; this design provides an uncluttered view of the steel hour and minute hands that is typical of early Fromanteel pendulum clocks. The signature “A. Fromanteel Londini” appears at the lower edge of the dial.



The movement is mounted on a bracket attached to a backboard of oak. Grooves in the sides of the hood allow it to slide down the edges of the backboard to the closed position, where it can be secured by a lock behind the apron at the bottom. Access to the keyhole is hidden by a gilded-brass satyr’s head. The hood, with its four subtly curved Doric columns with gilded-brass capitals that support the perfectly proportioned architrave, cornice, and pediment, exemplifies the restrained architectural character of the cases of some of the best English pendulum clocks of the period. The historian Larry Fabian has proposed that the design of these cases might be traced to the mathematician and architect Christopher Wren (1632–1723), whose Italianate buildings played a large part in the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666. Fabian has offered, in evidence, two engravings that reproduce drawings for weather clocks by Wren.[9] The clocks in Wren’s drawings have hoods that are of a style comparable to the hoods of surviving pendulum clocks, but the drawings cannot be dated before about 1663 with any certainty. In the absence of documentary evidence of connections between Wren and either the clockmakers or the clock casemakers in this period, it remains uncertain whether Wren’s designs simply reflect the forms of existing clocks, or his original ideas for clockcases.



With the removal of the winged cherub’s head (a later addition) from the pediment of the Metropolitan Museum’s clock, it is evident that the remarkable sobriety of the design must have been in keeping with Fromanteel’s religious sympathies. The restrained style was not, however, confined to Fromanteel’s clocks: the clocks of Edward East (1602–1697), John Hilderson (ca. 1630–ca. 1665), and Samuel Knibb (1625–1690), among others, were housed in similar cases made in England during the decade of the 1660s.[10] We know the names of Joseph Clifton (working 1663), John Gutch (admitted Clockmakers Company, 1673), and Robert Player (admitted Clockmakers Company, 1700), as makers of the clockcases during this period,[11] but their individual work has remained unidentified.



The present verge and crown-wheel escapement is probably a reconversion from an anchor escapement. The cock for the pendulum assembly and possibly the pendulum are modern replacements. The weights and pulleys are also of modern origin. The ornament in the pediment of the case, based on the design of ornaments for the spandrels of early pendulum clock dials, is a modern addition, as are probably the acorn-shaped ornaments at the bottom of the case. The lock for the hood of the case is now lost.



In 1952, the clock with its present escapement was included in the “British Clockmaker’s Heritage Exhibition” organized by the Antiquarian Section of the British Horological Institute and held in the London Science Museum. Lionel H. Moore was listed as the lender in the catalogue. [12] Moore sold the clock in London in 1960,[13] and subsequently it was purchased, probably from the London dealer Ronald A. Lee, by Irwin Untermyer, who bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum.



Notes (For key to shortened references see bibliography in Vincent and Leopold, European Clocks and Watches in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015)



[1] With concessions to modern spelling and capitalization, the advertisement has been quoted in its entirety in recent times by, among others, Ronald A. Lee in the introduction

to English Pendulum Clock 1969; Thompson 2004, p. 74; Vehmeyer 2004, vol. 2, pp. 497–98. A photograph of the page of the Oct. 21–28 advertisement appeared in the appendix to Penney 2009, p. 620.

[2] Huygens (Christiaan) 1658.

[3] The attempts to discredit this narrative are without merit. For a reasoned summary of the evidence, see Whitestone 2012.

[4] Loomes 1981, pp. 236–37.

[5] Aghib and Leopold 1974, p. 892.

[6] Leopold 1989, pp. 158–59; Leopold 2005c.

[7] Aghib and Leopold 1974, pp. 891–93; Leopold 1989, pp. 158–60.

[8] See Robinson 1981, pp. 26–28, and fig. 2/3, for the design, said by the author to be one of the earliest used on longcase clock dials.

[9] L. Fabian 1977.

[10] English Pendulum Clock 1969.

[11] Vehmeyer 2004, vol. 2, p. 526.

[12] British Clockmaker’s Heritage Exhibition 1952, p. 39, no. 84, and cover ill.

[13] Sotheby’s 1960, p. 36, no. 117, ill.