Swiss clocks are clocks made in Switzerland, a country whose name has become a byword for precision timekeeping. Although Switzerland is best known for watchmaking, centred on Geneva, the Jura mountains and the region around Neuchâtel, it also has a distinguished tradition of clockmaking that includes decorative domestic clocks, automata, travel clocks and highly engineered modern designs.
The most characteristic historic type is the Neuchâtel clock, or pendule neuchâteloise, an eighteenth and nineteenth-century bracket clock with a waisted case, often painted or lacquered with flowers and dressed with gilt mounts, which was made in the region and its surrounding villages. Swiss craftsmen were also famous for musical and automaton clocks, notably the work of the Jaquet-Droz family. In the twentieth century the Atmos clock produced by Jaeger-LeCoultre, which draws its power from small changes in temperature, became an icon of Swiss engineering. Not every clock sold as Swiss is genuinely so, since many cuckoo clocks were made in Germany's Black Forest. Collectors examine the movement for signatures and marks, and they value original cases, dials and painted decoration in good condition.
