An Enamel Technique Boosts This $42,000 Watch Fit for Royal Wrists
An Enamel Technique Boosts This $42,000 Watch Fit for Royal Wrists
(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Pierre Jaquet Droz created his first clockmaking studio in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in 1738. Over the course of the next half-century, his mechanical wizardry became famous in the courts of Europe. The clocks delighted the aristocracy, and some of his automatons—rudimentary computers shaped to look and perform like humans—still function. A hallmark of his pocket watch designs is a figure eight of overlapping dials, illustrated nicely on this $42,000 Grande Seconde Paillonée in rose gold for your wrist.
THE COMPETITION
• Van Cleef & Arpels is another grand keeper of old-world craft traditions. Its $71,000 Charms Romance Parisienne Promenade watch depicts the park by the Eiffel Tower with the use of champleve, in which enamel dust is poured into troughs carved into metal and then fired.
• The $8,800 Ulysse Nardin Classico Manufacture “Grand Feu” has a mesmerizing dial carved in a guilloche, or wave, pattern and covered in a deep blue enamel. It’s terrific for fans of the art who are looking for a lower price point.
• If cost isn’t a consideration, try the Fugaku Tourbillon from Seiko’s Credor collection, which features white and gold waves crashing in front of a sky painted with glittering maki-e lacquer. Each of the eight watches is priced at 50 million yen ($466,000).
THE CASE
The figure-eight dial of Jaquet Droz has long been auspicious for the Chinese market; Qianlong, the fifth emperor of the Qing dynasty, was a collector. But the design also leaves room on the watch face for detailed artistry such as paillonée. (Although the family-run maison folded in 1790, Swatch Group Ltd. restarted the brand in 2000 with an eye to historical techniques.) On the Grande Seconde Paillonée, craftsmen start with a guilloche dial and fire several layers of blue enamel on top, each time risking cracks or damage. Then they place gold-leaf fleur-de-lis paillons in a precise pattern before firing a final coat of translucent enamel. Limited to only eight pieces, this watch is sure to become a collector’s item. $42,000
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.