A Breguet Classique 3137, With Intricately Hand-Engraved Movement, From The Daniel Roth Era

Daniel Roth is famous for the watches he created under his own name, of course, and those designs, with subtle updates and some of the most spectacular new movements of at least the last decade, are gaining a new audience for Roth’s vintage work as well. I think probably anyone who takes an interest in his designs and his work probably becomes aware at some point, that Roth was also one of the most important watchmakers in the history of Breguet. Roth joined Breguet in 1975 at the age of 29, when the brand was owned by the Chaumet brothers, who had appointed Chaumet’s François Bodet to lead the project of bringing Breguet back into connection with its roots, and into greater visibility in the watch world. Roth worked with a prototypist named Louis-Maurice Caillet, and together, they created a series of designs based on the design language created by Abraham Louis Breguet.

One of the first watches they created was the reference 3130, which was also released as the reference 3137, starting around 1990. The 3137 is a display back version of the 3130, and although it uses the same caliber 502 (based on the F. Piguet caliber 71) the 3137’s movement is elaborately hand-engraved and almost unbelievably finely detailed. Production of the 3137 began in around 1990 and continued until the 36mm 3137 was replaced by the slightly larger 7137 in the present Breguet catalog.

The 3130/7 was based on Breguet No. 5, a pocket watch originally made in 1794, and in 2001 Breguet’s then-CEO Nicholas G. Hayek bought the watch at auction at Antiquorum – according to a 2003 post on Timezone.com, for CHF 1,150,000 which by today’s standards, seems like a bargain. Breguet would go on to produce six replicas, which were meticulous copies of the original. No. 5 was one of the most advanced precision mechanisms of its time – it was a “perpetuelle” (self-winding) with a 60 hour power reserve, moonphase, power reserve indicator, and small seconds. No. 5 was also an “à toc” quarter repeater – an à toc repeater is one in which the gong strikes the inside of the case band so the time is more felt than heard. For this reason, the à toc repeater is also called a “dumb repeater” (which as an unfortunately negative sounding term for a complication is right up there with “deadbeat seconds” and “dragging minutes”).

Breguet Pocket Watch No. 5

The reference 3130/7 watches omit the dumb repeater, and the small seconds on the original has been swapped out for a pointer date complication. Although less complicated than some of the other watches designed by Roth and Caillet for Breguet during the Chaumet era, it has the same wonderfully asymmetric, imaginative, and and almost serene appearance of the original pocket watch.

One of the stars of classic Breguet watches has always been the use of different guilloché patterns – sometimes as many as half a dozen in a single watch – to create visual contrast between different parts of the dial while at the same time, maintaining visual continuity. The 3137 is no different – the guilloché patterns are done with straight line and rose engine machines (often, nowadays, guilloché is imitated with stamping or CNC cutting machines) and as with No. 5, give the watch a sense of almost Art Deco restraint despite the almost Baroque degree of detail.

The hands are heat blued steel, and the case construction is as old school as it should be. The case is made of cold-rolled gold (cold rolling, which as the name says, involves passing metal through rollers in order to reduce its thickness) work-hardens the metal and gives a stronger and more durable surface. The lugs are made as separate pieces and then soldered into position in recesses on the case flank, with the intersections between the lugs and the case band finished with a file and then polished, in order to produce a sharp, clean transition.

The case, like the dial, is hand-polished and finished, with the coin-edge case middle so characteristic of Breguet’s production during his lifetime and of the brand’s watchmaking in the many decades since. The lugs use screwed-in bars rather than springbars to hold the strap in place, which is a more secure as well as a more elaborate solution and in its own small way, visually more attractive as well. Springbars in their uncounted millions (billions?) work just fine of course, but I think screwed in bars are more appropriate for a luxury watch (having said that, while springbars can pop loose on you, it’s not unheard of for screws to work loose as well).

The original 3130 came with an engraved solid caseback, but of course enthusiasts generally prefer to be able to see the movement in a piece of high end horology, and if you think the dial side of the 3137 looks good, boy have I got a show for you.

Behold the entirely hand-engraved Breguet caliber 502, based on the F. Piguet caliber 71. The F. Piguet 71 was an update to the preceding caliber 70 and was originally released in the early 1970s – it was one of a series of ultra-thin movements produced by F. Piguet and used by a number of different brands, including Breguet, Blancpain, and others (F. Piguet was absorbed into Blancpain in 2010 where it’s now known as Manufacture Blancpain, although its movements continue to be used by other brands – the Breguet 7137, for instance, still uses a version of the 502).

The caliber 502 is 27.4mm x 2.4mm and has an automatic winding rotor slightly offset from the center of the movement – a nice connection to the asymmetrical dial design. The Breguet 502/F. Piguet 71 is one of the thinnest automatic movements ever made; for comparison, the famous AP caliber 2120/JLC caliber 920, in the simplest version, without date or center seconds, is just 2.45mm thick (the thinnest full rotor automatic movement ever made). With added complications comes some added height, of course, and with the moonphase and power reserve, and that pointer date display, the height of the movement comes up to about 3.6mm, which is still, of course, extremely flat. With the 502 inside, the 36mm ref. 3137 comes in at just 8mm thick.

If the dial side of the watch only hints at the Baroque through the complexity of its detail, the movement side is as Baroque as the Hall Of Mirrors at Versailles.

Just about every surface that can be engraved has been engraved, including the rotor, with its stylized Breguet “B,” the movement bridges, including the mainspring barrel bridge and the bridge for the automatic winding train, the balance cock, and even the bridges for the escape wheel and for the lever (you can see the almost unbelievably fine engraving for the lever bridge underneath the arms of the freesprung balance). This is one of the most complex examples of movement decoration I have ever seen – and all the more impressive when you remember that there were no mechanical aids to creating the engraving; every single curve and flourish was created by hand, by an engraving using a sharp, hardened steel burin. The movement is plated in gold and the whole effect is just lushly rich.

The 3137 is an enormously charming watch and, moreover, it represents the sort of hand-craftsmanship which many brands imply is present in their watches but which is becoming more and more scarce anywhere outside of a handful of high-end indendent watchmakers. If you’re looking for something that represents 20th century watchmaking at one of its high points, this is a fantastic example of classic watchmaking, albeit in a particular idiom – and of course, it’s also a direct connection to a company which is, this year, celebrating a quarter millennium in business, and a pocket watch that was there when the foundations were being laid for the House of Breguet.

The 1916 Company is proud to be an authorized retailer for Montres Breguet and Daniel Roth.

See it here