Longcase/Grandfather Clock

Falling short of ambitious hopes but leading the day at Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) first sale of 2020 was a fine English Golden Age longcase clock.

Two leading BADA members have reported strong sales to close out the year.

Most regionally made Georgian oak longcase clocks can now be bought for under £500 but this example is by a highly regarded and collectable maker: John Wolley or Woolley (c.1738-95) of Codnor, Derbyshire.

A mahogany longcase clock by Thomas Mudge (1715-94) is priced at £45,000 from Cheltenham dealer Tobias Birch.

As the vast majority of Georgian clockmakers signed their work, most regional brass-dial longcase clocks have a great sense of place.

Kensington Church Street clock dealer Howard Walwyn will offer this previously unknown Thomas Tompion walnut and mulberry longcase at the Masterpiece fair in London.

Good times at the Oxford rooms of Mallams (20% buyer’s premium), when all bar one of 56 clocks got away almost all going comfortably above estimates.

An eight-day arched brass dial rolling moon-case clock, c.1750, is on offer for £3350 from Lancaster House Antiques at the next Galloway Antiques Fair at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire.

As a showpiece for horology, the 'Masterpiece' fair lives up to its name. For all its welcome focus on the cool of 21st century collecting, at its core the 'Masterpiece' fair is a high-quality antiques show in the tradition of the Grosvenor House fair it replaced.

By 1677, the great English clockmaker Thomas Tompion (1639-1713) was subletting part of his famous London premises – The Dial and Three Crowns at Water Lane – to one Jasper Braem or Bream (fl.1677-96).

Holker Hall, the privately owned country house in Cumbria, hosts its first fair in nearly 25 years this month.

Two of the first sales of 2018 suggest that toasts to the future can be drunk from half-full, rather than half-empty, Georgian rummers.

In recent years, Bonhams has uncovered several previously unrecorded English Golden Age clocks and at the sale of Fine Clocks on June 29 it will be presenting a recently discovered longcase clock by London maker John Fromanteel.