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A romantic Van Cleef & Arpels Midnight in Monaco

Van Cleef & Arpels is noted for its creativity. The House was formed in 1906 by Estelle Arpels and Alfred Van Cleef – two people very much in love. They not only wanted to create a love story but also a dynasty and in doing so they created the world of Van Cleef & Arpels.

They were both Dutch and they were moving to what was the center of the world at that time – Paris. They focused on everything that was positive – butterflies and dragonflies – because they are believed to bring blessings. In Van Cleef & Arpels’ creations you regularly see symbols of luck such as the four-leaf clover that is said to bring health, wealth, true love, and happiness.

“We want to create emotion,” says Stanislas de Quercize, President and CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels. “According to Jacques Arpels, the son of Julien Arpels our co-founder, our mission is to express the best. This means that you should recognize the Van Cleef & Arpels style immediately. It is often asymmetrical, and inspired by nature or couture, and has the magical touch of the jeweler who transforms things into something eternal.”

Van Cleef & Arpels work to three “best” principles: the brand’s instantly recognizable style; best craftsmen and best stones. “We call them ‘stones with soul’,” says de Quercize, “the ones that talk to you and when you see them your heart beats faster.” “We also want to create things that have never been done before, which is why we created the mysterious setting in 1933 which is a jeweler’s dream, you see no metal, you only see the stone. Some people say that the best way to summarize the brand is ´Very Creative Artists´,” smiles de Quercize.

Van Cleef & Arpels follows this mandate through to their watches. They made their first watch in 1908. “We know you have your computer, your cell phone and your car to tell the time so we need to give you more,” says Van Cleef & Arpels, “and in our watches we want also to create something that will show you that your time is precious.”

The idea of precious time at Van Cleef & Arpels is to grow your emotions. In their Poetic Complications it is the dials that move – the ballerinas or the seahorses, the fairy or the sun ever chasing the moon. “The piece that we are giving to Only Watch this year is a unique piece, Midnight in Monaco, based on our Poetic Complications,” says Nicolas Bos, Vice-president and Art Director of Van Cleef & Arpels. “At Van Cleef & Arpels there is a strong brand identity, a blend of craftsmanship and design that we express through our watch collections. Above all these are preciousness, elegance and tradition.”

Many of the brand’s watches are for women and are often extremely elegant feminine watches that echo their jewelry creations. Some are more design-orientated and take their inspiration from nature. “Something that we have been developing over the past few years which is inline with our century of tradition is the concept of Poetic Complications,” says Bos.

This is based on the concept that when you work with jewelry you try to recreate the feeling of movement using the hardest materials and the most traditional techniques. “The challenge when you create a piece of jewelry that depicts a butterfly or a flower is to get the feeling that the flower is going to blossom or the butterfly to fly,” says Bos, “even though the piece is made from platinum, gold or diamonds. What is great about watches is that there is already movement inside.”

Most of Van Cleef & Arpels pieces are inspired by stories or works of art – Midsummer’s night dream, Atlantis, Les Gardens – stories that have their roots in different cultures and traditions. So for their watches they started working with some of the best watchmakers to develop movements that could also tell stories. “Once again we worked with very simple ideas,” says Bos, “even though many of our pieces are quite complex in the making. We started with ladies watches with the idea to go against current trends and using the highest level of craftsmanship for mechanical movements to show what time means to Van Cleef & Arpels – which is a time linked to natural rhythms.”

Bos’s first idea was to create a watch that would show the passing of the seasons – something that had to be extremely slow but accurate, where you couldn’t see movement with the naked eye. “We developed variations on this movement and our next idea was to take the whole universe of fairies and fairy tales and magic found in our jewelry and incorporate it into our watches. The idea being that you see the story and not the movement.”

This resulted in the famous Van Cleef & Arpels Fairy watch for women where the fairy’s wand tells the hours and one of the fairy’s wings tells the minutes. They developed a special retrograde movement that could provide accuracy and strength for the very heavy disc that moved at a very slow pace. And after a long development process they found a solution to the problem. “There is a strong tradition with Van Cleef & Arpels to create very elegant men’s watches,” says Bos. Which is why they are also working on men’s watches in the same spirit as the watches they are creating for women using the same movement as a basis but with a masculine approach.

“Something I really like,” says Bos, “is the poetic approach to astronomy of scientific books from the 18th and 19th century where there is no difference made between astronomy and astrology. I love this kind of old-fashioned romantic feeling of the stars.” Which is how they came to design Midnight in Paris.

“For Only Watch,” says Bos, “we decided to make a special white gold Midnight in Monaco version of this watch which shows the exact position of the stars in the sky over Monaco as they are each day at midnight.” The watch dial, which is made in aventurine glass – Murano glass with particles of copper giving a Milky Way effect – displays a very accurate map of the sky that is also a hemisphere. Hand-painted on this dial are all the constellations and a map of the sky in the southern hemisphere – a poetic and romantic approach to the sky. In the center oval is displayed the exact position of the stars in the sky over Monaco as they are at midnight each day. At the back of the watch is a unique engraved and painted gold sculpture that depicts the landscape of Monaco.

 

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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