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| Passion Investments: Watches |
The Knack of Time
Jill Newman
08/01/2005
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The world’s most valuable timepiece has been missing since April 15, 1983, when
thieves broke into the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem and stole
57 watches made by Abraham-Louis Breguet. Among these was one that Breguet made
for Marie-Antoinette and which was the most complicated watch of its time.
 | | A PATEK Philippe watch made for James Ward Packard. |
In Marie-Antoinette’s quest for ingenious and extravagant toys, she
challenged the Swiss master watchmaker to create a self-winding watch and a
perpetual repeating calendar model. While imprisoned before her execution, in
fact, she ordered a quarter-repeating watch that was delivered to her cell. But
it was believed to be an amorous officer in her guard who commissioned the
priceless watch known as the Marie-Antoinette. The Breguet workshop spent 44
years constructing this technical marvel, which boasted a perpetual calendar
that adjusts automatically for 30- and 31-day months and leap years, a chiming
repeater for the hour, quarter-hour and minutes, a thermometer, a power-reserve
indicator and a chronograph. The Marie-Antoinette, completed in 1827, 34 years
after the queen’s death, remained with the Breguet family until 1887, when
Spencer Burton purchased it for 600 pounds. It changed hands twice more before
Breguet collector David Lionel Salomons acquired it. Upon his death in 1925, he
left his collection to his daughter, Vera, a philanthropist and aficionado of
Middle Eastern cultures, who donated the famed watch to the ill-fated
museum.
Marie-Antoinette helped raise the craft of horology to new heights
through her relationship with Breguet, which began in 1782 when she heard about
a new watchmaker from Neufchâtel, France, who opened a shop in Paris. Breguet
was more than just a mechanical genius; he was also a savvy marketer who knew
that the best way to become successful in the 18th century was to serve the
royal court and remain in the good graces of the extravagant Marie-Antoinette.
Her precious Breguet timepieces, however, were confiscated when revolutionaries
sacked the royal palace. The watches never reappeared. Today we know of them
only through records in the Breguet archives.
VALUE JUDGMENT
For centuries,
the craft of fine watchmaking has been advanced
by patrons who commission bespoke timepieces. The best of these intricate models command
high-six-figure values on the rare occasions that they are for sale. Today only
the most elite buyers can request a custom watch; watchmakers are wary of those
who intend to flip the timepiece at auction for profit. |
If the 1827 Marie-Antoinette
watch ever resurfaces for sale, it will most certainly surpass the highest price
ever paid at auction for a timepiece. No one in the watch auction houses of the
world is willing to offer a guess at its value. The current record price was
paid for a watch known as the Graves Supercomplication; it sold for $11 million at Sotheby’s in 1999 to an anonymous buyer. Henry Graves
Jr., the noted American banker, commissioned it from his favored watchmaker,
Patek Philippe. Completed in 1933 and boasting 24 complications, the watch held
the distinction of being the world’s most intricate timepiece for more than 50
years, until Patek introduced its Caliber 89 in 1989. Comprised of 900 parts,
including 110 wheels, the Supercomplication features a perpetual calendar,
celestial chart, moonphase, chronograph and a Westminster-style chime
alarm.
Daryn Schnipper, Sotheby’s international director of watches,
considers the Graves watch the most enigmatic watch ever made. “It’s hard to
believe the human mind could create this watch without the use of computers,”
she says. “It’s always been considered Patek’s most important watch because it
served as the model for all its future complications, including the famous Sky
Moon Tourbillon.”
Patronizing Appeals
Marie-Antoinette and Graves, though more than a
century apart, both lived during eras when watchmakers relied on the patronage
of ambitious, demanding clients. Their ingenious fantasies pushed the limits of
traditional watchmakers, and they undoubtedly appreciated the challenge and
desperately needed the financing to support their creative endeavors. James Ward
Packard, the American industrialist who drove automobile design at the turn of
the 20th century, is another notable figure among those collectors who have
coerced watch innovation. The intimate union between the world’s best
watchmakers and passionate collectors has proved to be an integral force in
advancing watch technology. The complicated, one-of-a-kind models that are the
result of these collaborations—at the rare moments when they have appeared on
the auction block—have soared in value like rare works of art.
Among
Packard’s demands were a Patek alarm watch that played his mother’s favorite
song from Godard’s opera Jocelyn and another model with 10 complications,
including sunrise and sunset with equation of time, moon phases, perpetual
calendar and a celestial chart depicting more than 500 stars, as they would
appear at night in Warren, Ohio, the patron’s birthplace.
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