In the early 19th century it became the fashion to own an oil painting of a town or village scene incorporating the tower of a church or similar building bearing a clock dial. The dial was not part of the painting but an actual clock dial, the mechanism of which was concealed in a space behind the picture. Some of these clocks also had music and mechanism to make the sails of a windmill rotate, fishermen mend nets, and so on. They usually have good French or Swiss mechanisms, and the musical and automata work is also of high quality, though the paintings as works of art may leave something to be desired.