Longcase clock with calendrical, lunar, and tidal indications, also known as the Graves Tompion

A weight-driven longcase clock of about 1677-80, from the earliest and least flamboyant period of Thomas Tompion's career, made before he began numbering his output and therefore untraceable in his own ledgers. Its ten-inch dial does four jobs at once: it tells the hour and minute, it carries the calendar apparatus needed to find the date of Easter, it tracks the moon's phase and age for anyone travelling at night before street lighting, and it predicts the time of high tide at London Bridge, where the wrong tide could kill a waterman. The case, built from oystershell-cut olive wood and floral marquetry, is credited on documentary grounds to Jasper Braem, a cabinetmaker who sublet part of Tompion's own Fleet Street workshop.

The clock disappears from the record for roughly two and a half centuries after it was made, resurfacing only in 1933 in the hands of a London clock dealer's client, Francis Herbert Green. Green sold it to the New York dealer Arthur S. Vernay in 1934, who sold it on to the banker Henry Graves Jr. Graves is better known today for a wristwatch commission: the Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue of the piece states that he also owned the Patek Philippe watch that stood, for fifty-six years, as the most complicated mechanical watch ever made. The Tompion clock stayed in the Graves family until his granddaughter, Marilyn Preston Graves, bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1999.

It has never been sold at public auction; every transfer of ownership on record was a private sale or a bequest. It is not the other well-known Tompion associated with a royal sale, the silver-mounted Mostyn Tompion at the British Museum, a different clock entirely, made for a different king, sold at a different sale, and now in a different city's collection.

What it is

The case stands 77 inches tall, a little over six feet, in oak veneered with walnut and, on the base and trunk door, with oystershell-cut olive wood arranged so the grain reads like the petals of a flower. Five panels of floral marquetry in green-stained bone, ivory, and various other woods run down the trunk door. The rising hood, glazed to let the dial be read from the front, is flanked by Baroque spiral columns with gilded-brass Corinthian capitals and bases, repeated as quarter columns at the back corners, and the hood is finished with a deep profile-moulded wooden cornice. The Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue calls the case "beautifully proportioned" and "an unusually fine product of the late 1670s", and singles it out among Tompion's longcase clocks of the period for its decoration.

The ten-inch dial is gilded brass with a silvered chapter ring of roman numerals for the hours and individual arabic numerals for the minutes, themselves subdivided into ten-second intervals, a degree of precision on the chapter ring that was not routine on domestic clocks of this date. Cherub heads with wings, an early form of a spandrel motif Tompion used throughout his career, fill the four corners. The movement inside is brass and steel: an eight-day, weight-driven going train of three wheels ending in an anchor escapement regulated by a long pendulum, with bolt-and-shutter maintaining power to keep the clock running while it is wound. On its own this would be a good, standard clock for 1677. What makes it unusual is everything the dial is asked to display beyond the time, and the four-bell striking mechanism built to announce it.

The dial: a working almanac

Around the hour chapter, four separate readouts are built into the dial, and none of them is decorative. A double aperture at twelve o'clock shows the day of the week paired with the classical planetary god who was held to govern that day, the ordinary learned convention of the period for naming the days: this pairing of weekday and ruling planet, not a private symbol of Tompion's, is simply how an educated Restoration household read a calendar. A second double aperture at six o'clock gives the day of the month, the name of the month with the number of days it runs, and the number of the current week within the year.

At nine o'clock a hand-set disk carries a double ring of the letters A to G, the Dominical Letters. These were the standard tool, inherited from Roman reckoning and still in ordinary ecclesiastical use in the seventeenth century, for calculating the date of Easter and the moveable feast days that follow from it, work that fell to clergy and to anyone keeping a household calendar before printed almanacs made the calculation unnecessary. Its presence on this dial is not evidence of any private or hidden belief on Tompion's part; it is evidence that the clock was built to do a job the Anglican liturgical calendar of its day actually required. A purely decorative gilt sunburst at three o'clock balances the disk visually and does no further work.

The most complex readout is the revolving disk at the centre of the dial, which shows the moon's astrological aspects, its phase, and its age within the lunar month, one to twenty-nine days, together with the time of high tide, one to twelve o'clock and again one to twelve, probably for London Bridge. Both indications had a plain, practical reason to exist in London in the 1670s and neither needs a mystical explanation. Before street lighting, the phase of the moon genuinely determined whether travel after dark was safe or foolish, and the tide at London Bridge was a matter of life and death for the watermen who worked the river: the bridge's narrow arches and closely set stone piers turned the water beneath them into a set of rapids at the wrong state of tide, a hazard Londoners called "shooting the bridge", and drownings there are recorded often enough that the crossing carried its own grim proverb, that London Bridge was built for wise men to cross over and fools to go under. A clock that could tell its owner the state of the tide at a glance was not showing off; it was answering a real question that a Thames-side household asked every day. Taken as a whole, the dial is an ordinary, well-documented civic and ecclesiastical instrument, not a coded one, and saying so plainly is the honest reading of it.

An unusually complicated striking train

Tompion did not stop at the dial. The striking train, driven by four wheels and a fly and controlled by a count wheel mounted on the great wheel inside the plates, rings four bells mounted on two stands rather than the usual one or two. A stand swivels automatically to present the correct bell, which is how two pairs of bells fit inside the relatively small space of the hood. The full hour sounds on a larger, lower-pitched bell; a smaller, higher-pitched bell on the same stand repeats the past hour at the half; and a separate pair of smaller bells, sometimes called ting-tangs, strike the quarters, once at the first quarter and twice at the third, as double blows. The Metropolitan Museum's catalogue calls this "an unusual embellishment" specific to this clock's striking train, and it is the clearest sign in the movement of Tompion working out how to pack extra information into a case no bigger than an ordinary longcase clock needed to be.

The case, and the cabinetmaker who may have built it

Around 1676 Tompion moved his workshop to the corner of Fleet Street and Whitefriars Street, then called Water Lane, a shop that became known as The Dial and Three Crowns. Research by the horologist Jeremy L. Evans established that in 1677 Tompion was subletting part of that building to a cabinetmaker, Jasper Braem, a Dutchman active in London from about 1677 to about 1696, whose documented skill lay in marquetry "done with several coloured woods in Resemblance of flowers, leaves etc." On the strength of that tenancy and that specialism, the Metropolitan Museum's catalogue credits Braem with the case of this clock and of some of Tompion's other, more decorative longcase clocks from the same years, while stating the attribution as probable rather than certain: if it is correct, Braem made the case while he was Tompion's own tenant, which would place the cabinetmaker and the clockmaker working under the same roof.

Dating a clock before it had a number

There is no serial number cut into the movement or the case, and its absence is itself evidence rather than an oversight. Tompion's business grew large enough that he began keeping ledgers and numbering his clocks and watches to correspond to entries in them, a practice historians treat as one of the first serial-numbering systems applied to any manufactured goods. The Museum's 2015 catalogue of its clock and watch collection, citing Evans's research, places the start of that numbering system at about 1682 and states plainly that this clock predates it. The Museum's own 1999 acquisition Bulletin, written at the time of the bequest, instead placed the start of numbering "sometime after 1685" and dated the clock itself to "probably ca. 1675-78"; by 2015, working from Evans's more developed research and from the 2013 catalogue raisonne of Tompion's output compiled by Evans with Jonathan Carter and Ben Wright, the Museum had revised both figures, reasoning that since Braem is only known to have been Tompion's tenant from 1677, and the clock predates the post-1682 numbering system, it "should be dated, therefore, between 1677 and 1682, probably earlier in that five-year period than later." The clock's own ledgers, which would have settled the question outright, are lost. That two successive scholarly publications by the same institution narrowed the date by revising the same underlying research is the plainest kind of catalogue history: each generation of cataloguing corrected the one before it on documented grounds, not on new speculation.

Thomas Tompion: from a Bedfordshire forge to the Dial and Three Crowns

Thomas Tompion was baptised on 25 July 1639 in Northill, Bedfordshire, the son of the blacksmith Thomas Tompion Sr. and his wife Margaret, a fact drawn from the parish register itself rather than from later biography. His first modern biographer, R. W. Symonds, filled in Tompion's early life with an account that Symonds himself admitted was based mostly on legend. Working from the surviving documents rather than the legend, the horologist Jeremy L. Evans has since given what the Metropolitan Museum's catalogue calls "a sober-minded summary" of the real possibilities: Tompion may have trained with Samuel Knibb, whose Newport Pagnell workshop was near the Tompion family forge at Ickwell, or with the London makers Edward East or Ahasuerus I Fromanteel, but no apprenticeship record for him with any of the three has been found, and Evans's own conclusion is that Tompion most likely did not enter the trade through the usual apprenticeship at all.

What is documented is his admission to London's Clockmakers' Company on 4 September 1671, as a Brother, by payment of a fee of thirty shillings, admitting him specifically as a "Great Clockmaker", a maker of turret clocks; full freedom of the Company, with its attached privileges, did not follow until 6 April 1674, by a further ten shillings. Those fees were sizeable, and the Museum's catalogue reads them as evidence that Tompion entered the Company "by redemption" - by payment - rather than by completing a formal apprenticeship, which is consistent with Evans's reading of his early career. By 1671 he was already established in London with, in the Museum's words, "an extensive knowledge of metalworking". Around 1676 he moved his workshop to the corner of Fleet Street and Whitefriars Street, a shop later known as The Dial and Three Crowns, where the clock catalogued here was made within the following few years.

Royal patronage, and Robert Hooke

Tompion worked across four reigns, Charles II, James II, William III and Mary II, and Anne, and his most documented royal commissions date from the William and Mary years: a year-going equation clock made for William III remains today in the British Royal Collections, and a year-going, spring-driven clock extravagantly mounted in silver, known as the Mostyn Tompion, was also made for William III and is now in the British Museum. Its royal commission places it in a different world from the Metropolitan Museum's own longcase clock: the Museum's 2015 catalogue is explicit that its clock "belongs to an earlier, less flamboyant period in the clockmaker's career", made roughly a decade before William and Mary's accession and with no documented royal connection of its own.

The clearest evidence of Tompion's place in the scientific culture of Restoration London, rather than in its court, is his documented association with Robert Hooke, Curator of Experiments to the Royal Society. Hooke's own diary records numerous meetings with Tompion beginning in 1674, in the years the two men worked together on a spiral balance spring for watches, an invention Tompion adopted for the pieces he made, in what amounted to a real, documented rivalry with Christiaan Huygens for priority in the same invention. In the same decade Charles II selected Tompion to build two clocks with thirteen-foot pendulums, finished in 1676, for the newly founded Royal Observatory at Greenwich, precision instruments built to serve the Observatory's own astronomical programme rather than any private household. Both facts place Tompion inside the working circle of the Royal Society's practical science in the 1670s, documented by Hooke's own diary and by the Observatory commission, and neither claim rests on inference from the object catalogued here, which is not itself connected to Hooke or to the Observatory in any source consulted.

George Graham, and the numbering system's afterlife

Tompion took two documented partners late in his career. In 1701 he went into partnership with Edward Banger, a partnership that lasted until about 1707 or 1708, when it was dissolved in circumstances no source consulted explains clearly. His second and better-documented partner was George Graham, who began working for Tompion around 1696 while still nominally apprenticed to the clockmaker Henry Aske. In 1704 Graham married Tompion's niece, Elizabeth; in 1711 he became Tompion's partner outright; and in 1713, on Tompion's death, he succeeded him at the Dial and Three Crowns, at what by then was numbered 67 Fleet Street. In 1721 Graham became one of the small number of working clockmakers elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, an honour that reflects his own later reputation as an inventor, and he continued Tompion's numbering system for the clocks and watches that came out of the workshop after him.

Buried in Westminster Abbey

Thomas Tompion died on 20 November 1713 and was buried in Westminster Abbey; George Graham was buried alongside him in 1751. The epithet by which Tompion is still known, "the Father of English Clockmaking", is repeated across the modern horological and popular literature consulted for this record, though no source consulted traces the phrase to a single original coiner. It reflects a settled scholarly consensus rather than a single person's judgement. As the horologist Fortunat Mueller-Maerki put it, reviewing the standard modern catalogue of Tompion's work, "most horological historians of England would agree that the most celebrated craftsman making timekeepers in England during their golden era of clock production is the London based craftsman Thomas Tompion."

From a Cornhill exhibition to a Fifth Avenue gallery

Nothing documents this clock's ownership for roughly two and a half centuries after it was made. It resurfaces in 1933, when it belonged to Francis Herbert Green, a liveryman of the Clockmakers' Company, who showed it as number three in a loan exhibition of Tompion clocks at his own premises, 13 Royal Exchange, Cornhill, London, reported at the time in the Illustrated London News. Green died in 1936; before that, on 8 February 1934, he had already sold the clock to the New York antiques dealer Arthur S. Vernay, a transaction documented by a bill of sale whose photocopy is held in the Metropolitan Museum's own files, a copy the Museum's catalogue thanks the dealer Chris Jussel for providing along with the 1933 exhibition clipping. Vernay in turn sold the clock in 1934 to Henry Graves Jr., a member of a prominent New York banking family. It remained in the Graves family until Henry Graves Jr.'s death in 1953, then passed by descent to his granddaughter, Marilyn Preston Graves, who bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1999. At no point in this chain, so far as the sources consulted record, was the clock sold at public auction; every transfer was a private sale between a dealer and a collector, or a bequest.

The banker who also owned the most complicated watch ever made

Henry Graves Jr. (1868-1953) was a New York banker from a family of bankers, and his name is far better known today for a single commission than for this clock. In 1925 he commissioned the Geneva firm of Patek Philippe to build the most complicated watch it could make, in open competition with the automobile manufacturer James Ward Packard, who was pursuing the same title; the resulting watch, completed in 1933 with twenty-four separate complications, stood as the most complicated mechanical watch ever made for fifty-six years. The Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue of its clock and watch collection draws the connection explicitly: discussing the Graves family's ownership of the Tompion clock, it states that "Graves had several other remarkable horological items in his collection, notably a chronograph watch by the Geneva firm of Patek Philippe, said to be the most complicated mechanical watch ever made", citing a 1999 Sotheby's sale catalogue and a 2014 article on the watch published by the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors. The description matches no other watch of the period; it is, on the Museum's own account, the same Henry Graves Jr. and, in substance, the same collecting instinct that bought both an astronomically complicated Restoration longcase clock and, two and a half centuries later, the most complicated pocket watch of the twentieth century.

What has been repaired

The Metropolitan Museum's catalogue is candid about the clock's repair history, and none of it is hidden or disputed; it is simply recorded. The going train keeps its original wheels, but the anchor now on the movement replaces an earlier one of a somewhat different shape, and the back cock and crutch that support the pendulum have also been replaced; no source consulted dates any of these three replacements. When the clock entered the Museum's collection, the hood had at some point been modified so that it could slide forward rather than lift in its original manner; because the original spring-latch for securing the hood in its open position was still in place underneath the modification, the Museum's own conservators were able to return the hood mechanism to its original operation. Some veneer on the trunk and plinth had been replaced in an earlier, undated period of repair, and further veneer, missing from the hood and trunk, was replaced by the Museum's own wood conservators after acquisition. The present skirt at the base of the case probably replaces an original one, but the Museum's catalogue states plainly that there is insufficient evidence to be certain whether the current skirt and feet are original, later period replacements, or modern. None of this is presented by the Museum as a marriage of parts from different objects, and no source consulted disputes that the movement and case belong together as made; it is a documented history of ordinary wear, repair, and conservation on a clock now approaching three hundred and fifty years old.

Not the Mostyn Tompion

Two different Tompion clocks are sometimes confused in casual reference precisely because both carry a collector's surname and both have well-documented royal or American connections. This record describes only the Graves Tompion: a weight-driven longcase clock in an oak, walnut, and marquetry case, made about 1677-80 with no documented royal commission, bought by an American collector from a New York dealer in 1934, and bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1999, accession number 1999.48.2.

It is not the Mostyn Tompion, a year-going, spring-driven clock extravagantly mounted in silver that Tompion made for William III, sold at the 1982 dispersal of the Mostyn family collection and now in the British Museum, London, registration number 1982,0702.1. The two clocks share a maker and a period, and nothing else: different mechanism (weight versus spring drive), different material emphasis (oak and marquetry versus silver mounting), different original patron (none documented, versus a king), different modern collection (New York versus London), and different modern provenance (an American banking family versus a Welsh landed family's 1982 sale). No image, fact, or source cited in this record concerns the Mostyn Tompion; it is named here only to prevent the two objects being mistaken for one another.

On view now

The clock is on permanent display at The Met Fifth Avenue, in Gallery 509, alongside other English clocks and watches of the same period, including two other pieces signed by Tompion. The Museum holds the image rights as public domain and has released photographs of the clock, taken under its own Open Access programme, under a CC0 dedication, which is why this record is able to reproduce them in full. As of the date this record was last verified, the Museum's own online catalogue record, its 2015 print catalogue, and its 1999 acquisition Bulletin remain the three primary sources for everything stated here; no further scholarship specific to this individual clock, beyond its entry in the 2013 catalogue raisonne of Tompion's output, was located.