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A New Breguet Travel Clock for Only Watch

Ever since 1775, Breguet has unfailingly harbored, and honored essential values such as beauty, elegance and high technologies along with mastery of watchmaking. Carefully preserving its heritage and identity, Breguet more than ever embodies the art and culture of Europe. Benefiting for the last ten years from Nicolas G. Hayek’s personal guidance, the brand has now reached its legitimate place as a leading name in prestige horlogerie.

Breguet enthusiasts and connoisseurs appreciate the brand’s unique qualities and attributes. Delicate engine-turned “guilloché” work, the famed blued-steel Breguet hands, stylish fluting on the caseband – all unmistakable features found on most of the models.

“Breguet is the perfect alliance of European art and culture, and high-tech innovations.” says Nicolas G. Hayek. Over the years, countless famous figures have carried a Breguet – Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Marie-Antoinette of France, Winston Churchill and Rossini are just a few of the distinguished personalities who have owned a Breguet timepiece. From Stendhal to Pushkin and from Alexandre Dumas to Victor Hugo, talented pens have confirmed the Breguet watch as a cult object. Regularly mentioned throughout Balzac’s “Comédie humaine”, it has long been synonymous with luxury, refinement and creative genius.

Today, Breguet perpetuates the beauty, the technical virtuosity, and the overall excellence of the brand’s products and the fascination they have always exerted on watch enthusiasts and connoisseurs the world over. On the production front, the priority of the brand is investing in the most advanced research equipment, working on new materials, components and inventing new mechanisms.

“From the design of the first double tourbillon to the re-creation of the celebrated Marie-Antoinette watch that made us rediscover forgotten techniques,” says Hayek, “Breguet has had many wonderful and challenging projects, each a uniquely memorable adventure, and this continues.”

It was in 1796 that Breguet built the first modern travel clock. Equipped with a balance spring (which successfully replaced the pendulum balance that was unfit for travel purposes), glass-covered on four sides and small in size, this travel clock bore the number 178. It was bought in April 1798 by General Bonaparte.

Bonaparte, already famous in Italy and preparing to leave for Egypt, was in the middle of his social and political rise to fame. He was on the lookout for refined artefacts, symbols of power and of social standing. Then, for practical reasons, he also needed to take a solid and reliable time-keeper with him on his expeditions. The piece would have had to endure the sands of Egypt and a lot of mishandling – and would have had amazing things to tell …if only it could talk.

After experiencing many adventures, the Breguet travel clock N° 178 is today the property of the Swiss National Museum. The clock displayed the general technique and shape of the travel clocks (or officers’ clocks) produced in France during the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century. But Breguet planned to improve the formula even more.

Of classic style, with a finely engraved box adorned with Corinthian columns, or stunningly modern, in the shape of a silver milestone, some of the travel clocks from the first half of the XIX century were real masterpieces equipped with great complications.

Today, the Breguet collection still includes a travel clock fitted with both a hand-wound mechanical movement and thermometer, and it is on this clock that Breguet have based a very limited series of seven travel clocks, the first of which, number one of seven, they have given to Only Watch.

The style of this clock is classical Art Deco with columns, and traditionally hand-guilloché dial.

Rare today, guillochage (engine-turning) is a true work of art and one of the crafts that instantly identifies this Only Watch dial as genuine Breguet. Today still, Breguet craftsmen use guillochage lathes designed and built over a century ago. With a precision of a tenth of a millimeter, they engrave beautiful patterns reflecting their virtuosity. Once the dial plate has been meticulously hand-guillochaged, it is silver coated using techniques developed over two centuries ago.

The prestige-finished, manual-winding movement in this clock is totally made in Breguet’s Valley de Joux manufactory. On the reverse there is a sapphire crystal through which you can view and appreciate in full the quality and finish of the movement.

Following the tradition of travel clocks, this timepiece comes in a special travel case, which you can keep closed for protection or open in order to display the time during your travels, or place it on a desk to be able, for instance, to see the time and check the temperature.

 

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For more information contact:
Ita McCobb
Patrizzi & Co Auctioneers SA
Tel +41 22 318 28 38
e-mail i.mccobb@patrizziauction.com

Audrey Baylac
Association Monégasque contre les Myopathies / Monaco Yacht Show
Tel +377 93 10 41 70
e-mail audrey@monacoyachtshow.mc