Antique Banjo Barometers
A wall-hung wheel barometer in a rounded case with a tapering neck, made to be read across a room rather than up close.
Antique Banjo Barometers
The wheel barometer came out of the eighteenth century: a float on a mercury column, a cord over a pulley, and a pointer that swings round a large circular dial. That big dial is the whole point, legible from the other side of a hall. The rounded case with its narrow neck earned the banjo nickname, and from the later nineteenth century the same shape was fitted with aneroid movements needing no mercury at all.
What you are most likely to meet on Sellingantiques is a late Victorian oak case. Oak runs through 140 of 370 titles, carved in 57 of them and polished in 45, and the word Victorian appears in 151. Dealer dating clusters hard: two-thirds of the clean-dated pieces fall between 1880 and 1899. Many carry no maker's name in the title.
Around it sit four other strands. Small walnut and mahogany cases, 19 of them called pendant, slim and short. Inlaid rosewood and mahogany with stringing and shell or fan motifs, named in 61 titles. Georgian and Regency mercury wheel barometers, under a tenth of listings but the top of the price range. And Edwardian aneroid cases, with a scattering of Art Deco and 1930-dated pieces at the tail.
Dating is often a word rather than a year. Victorian, 19th Century, Georgian, 18th Century and 1800s all stand in for a date in the dealer field, so an oak case of the 1880s and a Georgian mahogany one can sit under the same one-word entry. Titles sometimes go finer, with a circa of their own. Dial diameters get quoted in inches, from 5 up to 12.
Where The Range Splits
Timber and age move together. Plain and carved oak fills the lower and middle band; George III mahogany and nineteenth-century rosewood cluster at the top, and terms like burr walnut, flame mahogany and birds eye turn up only on the higher-priced entries. Inlay pushes the same way, with mother-of-pearl, shell, boxwood, brass and marquetry named almost entirely toward the upper end.
A name on the dial counts. The unsigned oak banjos say nothing about who made them, while the higher-priced listings give a maker and a town, and the towns are provincial as often as they are London. Aylesbury, Chesham, Weymouth, Colchester, King's Lynn, Ipswich, Taunton, Shrewsbury, Swindon, Darlington, Wigan and High Wycombe each appear once.
Scale and movement finish the picture. Small or smaller qualifies 71 titles and runs through the cheaper band, while large, oversized, and 10- and 12-inch dials sit at the top of the range. Mercury movements are named in 10 titles against 20 for aneroid, and mercury, along with skeletonised dials showing the works, sits above the plain aneroid oak.
Antique Banjo Barometers Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for banjo barometers, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
The top sale of the last year was a George III brass-inlaid mahogany banjo barometer by A Abraham of Liverpool, in January 2026.
The Antique Banjo Barometers Glossary
- Banjo or wheel barometer
- The same object, described two ways: a circular dial in a rounded case with a tapering neck, hung on a wall.
- Aneroid
- A sealed metal chamber movement with no mercury, named in 20 titles and standard on the later oak and Edwardian cases.
- Mercury or mercurial
- The older float-and-pulley system reading off a mercury column, said outright in 10 titles.
- Pendant
- Used in 19 titles for a small, slender case, almost always walnut.
- Skeletonised
- The dial cut away so the movement shows through; one title calls it visible works.
- Golden oak
- A light, warm-toned oak finish named in several Victorian titles. Burr walnut, a figured veneer, appears on a handful of the carved cases.
Antique Banjo Barometers: Frequently Asked Questions
How common are banjo barometers on Sellingantiques?
Around 48 are listed in a year, and 49 different dealers have handled one. It is a form almost any general dealer carries at some point rather than a specialist's preserve.
The archive behind this guide runs to 370 listings, sold and for sale.
What period do most of them come from?
The dated field runs from 1800 to 1930. Of the 227 listings with a clean year, 62 fall in the 1880s and 68 in the 1890s, so two-thirds of them sit in that twenty-year stretch.
After that come the 1900s with 39, then the 1860s and 1870s. Eighteenth-century cases are the rarest arrivals, at ten listings, one placed at circa 1785.
Which timber turns up most often?
Oak, and by a wide margin: 140 of 370 titles. It is described as carved in 57 and polished in 45, with golden oak named in several.
Walnut follows at 44 titles, then mahogany and rosewood, which carry most of the Georgian and inlaid work.
Are mercury or aneroid movements more usual?
Aneroid is named in 20 titles, mercury in 10. The aneroid movement needs no mercury and became the normal fitting for the later Victorian and Edwardian oak cases.
Mercury movements and Georgian mahogany cases together account for almost everything at the top of the range.
What does pendant mean in a barometer title?
It describes a small, slim banjo case. Nineteen titles use the word, and those are almost always walnut.
Small or smaller qualifies 71 titles in all, so short-format cases are a steady presence rather than an oddity.
Does anything unusual show up in this category?
Now and then, yes. A tortoiseshell case, a black chinoiserie one, an American carved walnut barometer, and a banjo clock-barometer with both dials in the one case.
One case is described as oversized, and dial diameters quoted in titles stretch from a 5-inch rosewood example up to a 12-inch wheel barometer.