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The Encyclopedia of Horology

Clock type · Domestic

Wag-on-the-Wall Clocks

Partially verified

An unencased weight-and-pendulum clock movement hung directly on a wall or in a corner cupboard, with its weights and long pendulum left visibly exposed rather than enclosed in a trunk, a precursor and rural alternative to the fully cased longcase clock.

Movement & mechanism

  • Weight-driven, usually with a long (near seconds-length) pendulum swinging freely and visibly beneath the movement
  • Anchor or, in the earliest examples, verge escapement, matching contemporary longcase practice
  • Movement, dial, weights and pendulum are mounted directly to a wall bracket or hung in an open corner cupboard rather than being enclosed in a trunk case

Identification

  • Absence of any trunk casework, with weights and pendulum left in plain view, is the defining feature
  • Movement and dial are frequently later re-housed in a proper longcase trunk once the owner's means allowed, so a genuinely un-cased survivor is comparatively unusual
  • Wall bracket or mounting board marks on the movement's original mounting points can indicate an unaltered wag-on-the-wall history

Terminology

  • Wag-on-the-wall — the descriptive English-language trade term for this exposed, uncased type
  • Stoelklok — a related Dutch wall-hung clock tradition, sometimes cited alongside the wag-on-the-wall type

Known variations

  • Verge-escapement wag-on-the-wall clocks (earliest)
  • Anchor-escapement wag-on-the-wall clocks
  • Examples later re-housed in longcase trunks

Collecting notes

Genuinely unaltered wag-on-the-wall survivals, retaining their original open mounting rather than a later-added trunk, are relatively scarce and of particular interest to specialists in early domestic weight-driven clocks; movements later fitted into longcase trunks are correspondingly more common but represent a documented later alteration.

Related photographs

Longcase clock movement
Longcase clock movement — Edmund Beckett (Lord) Grimsthorpe, Public domain. Wikimedia Commons file page
Grandfather clock q
Grandfather clock q — Original uploader was Quadell at en.wikipedia Later version(s) were uploaded by Evertype at en.wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons file page
Longcase clock
Longcase clock — AKS.9955, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikimedia Commons file page

No confidently matched photograph of this subject has been found yet. These photographs show a closely related record, and are not examples of the type described on this page.

Sources & references

  1. Britten, F. J., Old Clocks and Watches and Their Makers

Where sources disagree, the disagreement is stated rather than resolved silently.