First Class: Aristocratic Complications Coming Up At Phillips New York Watch Auction X

I don’t know if it’s an actual trend, or just an artefact of the degree to which some watches become highly visible on social media instead of others but it sometimes feels to me like we are living in the golden age of the high grade, simple, time-only (or time-and-date only) mechanical watch. Some of the biggest reputations of the last decade have been made by watches which are not particularly complicated, irrespective of their quality – makers like Philippe Dufour and Rexhep Rexhepi (both of whom for the sake of completeness and balance, I should note are no strangers to complications) and watches like the Simplicity, Chronomètre Contemporain, as well as newcomers like Fleming and J.N. Shapiro, have all made the simple, haute horlogerie, simple watch the gold standard for fine watchmaking.

Part of the reason for this is that there is a definite charm to a simple watch – in many ways, it represents the highlighting of the most basic elements of what makes fine watchmaking fine in the first place. Complicated watchmaking by comparison can come across as baroque, unnecessarily showy, and visually cumbersome, especially to modern tastes. However, complications historically have been a domain in which the most respected individual watchmakers and companies have often made their mark – Breguet’s reputation, just to pick one example, would almost certainly not be what it is today if it were not for his inexhaustible appetite for technical invention and innovation, and George Daniels, while rightly famous for his invention of the co-axial escapement, was also an inveterate maker of, and innovator in, complicated watchmaking as well.

Phillips New York Watch Auction: X, running on June 8th and 9th, has plenty to interest and satisfy lovers of watchmaking as the art of simplicity (and variations on simplicity). But it also has a quite dizzying array of complicated watches that show just how big the universe of fine watchmaking really is.

A Cartier CPCP Tortue Minute Repeater. Cartier is not often thought of as a maker of complicated watches and that is partly by design – especially in the last ten years or so, the company has reaffirmed its long-standing credentials as a maker of simple watches with case and dial designs that are anything but simplistic. However, through its long history the company has produced some wonderful complications and when you combine an aristocrat like the minute repeater, with a classic case design like the Tortue, you get a winner. The repeater has the additional advantage in terms of showcasing design, that it gives up very little in clarity and simplicity to a time-only watch – unless the dial is opened, the incredible ballet of racks, levers, and gears underlying the chiming of the time makes itself known only by its song, like a nightingale hidden among the branches.

An Audemars Piguet Jules Audemars Equation Of Time. Watches that show the time of sunrise and sunset are not exactly ubiquitous, but the first wristwatch to be able to pull off this feat appeared very recently, as history is reckoned in horology. It was 24 years ago that the first such watch was launched – in 2000, Audemars Piguet gave us the Jules Audemars Equation Of Time. (The next watch to have the sunrise-sunset complication appeared just a few months later – the EOS, by Martin Braun. The Jules Audemars Equation of Time is also a perpetual calendar, has an Equation of Time “Marchant” (in which a hand showing the Equation of Time for the day “marches” around the dial with the hour and minute hand) and it was also the first watch to show the time of solar culmination – that is, true solar noon, when the Sun is at its zenith. One of the most poetically beautiful astronomical watches Audemars Piguet, or anyone else, ever made.

An F.P. Journe Fourth Series Tourbillon Souverain. Modern independent watchmakers often establish their reputations with high quality, beautifully designed simple watches. A quarter century ago, though, F.P. Journe established his reputation with complicated watches and to this day, his Tourbillon Souverain and Chronomètre à Résonance still define the essence of his watchmaking for his many collectors, and for the entire enthusiast community. This “fourth series” is the last of the original Tourbillon Souverain models before Journe completely redesigned his tourbillon, with a hidden remontoire but with visible deadbeat seconds, in 2004. At this point in the history of watchmaking, wristwatch tourbillons were far rarer than they are today, and of course, nobody before Journe – nobody – had ever combined the tourbillon with a constant force remontoir in a wristwatch.

A Ulysse Nardin Oversized Rattrapante Chronograph, With Guillaume Balance. For most of us, the name Ulysse Nardin conjures first and foremost, the groundbreaking carousel wristwatch known as the Freak, but the company’s history goes back much, much further, and includes not only the revolutionary astronomical complications designed for UN by Dr. Ludwig Oechslin, but also, since the company’s founding in 1846, the production of highly regarded marine chronometers, and complicated watches as well. This example is one of them – a rattrapante (split seconds) chronograph, completed in 1915, which is an astonishing 52mm in diameter (it is according to the catalog notes, the largest rattrapante wristwatch ever made) and it is not a pocket watch conversion – the movement was originally cased as a wristwatch.

The rattrapante chronograph is considered one of the top three complications in fine watchmaking, along with the perpetual calendar and minute repeater – traditionally, for a watch to be called a grand complication, it had to have all three – thanks to the extreme care necessary in the construction and adjustment of the mechanism. In addition to the complication, this watch also has a so-called Guillaume balance – I would highly recommend checking out the essay from Phillips’ Logan Baker, who goes into all the details behind this exotic balance which, in its heyday, was the last word in high precision balances.

A Beat Haldimann Flying Central Tourbillon. This is, just to throw in a personal note, one of my favorite watches of all time and yet, months can go by without my thinking of it at all largely thanks to the character of its maker. Beat Haldimann is a member of a family of watchmakers going back centuries – the first bill of sale for a watch made by a Haldimann is from 1642 – and he has occupied himself for his entire professional life, in making the highest quality handmade, often complicated, watches and clocks, including a double balance resonance tourbillon with a remontoir on both escape wheels. The Flying Central Tourbillon was introduced in 2002 (two years after he announced his resonance pendulum clock) and it is not only a very rare example of a central tourbillon; it is also almost unbelievably finely made. The parts of the tourbillon cage in particular is so incredibly thin as to be almost invisible, and what is also incredible is that he’s not better known and more avidly collected, but I suspect that is how he likes it. I have seen him exactly once at a trade show – at an iteration of the long-defunct Baselworld – and as far as I can tell he is almost – maybe entirely – uninterested in anything except watch and clockmaking.

A Charles Frodsham Grand Sonnerie Clock-Watch, With Perpetual Calendar, Tourbillon, And Moonphase. Phillips has this to  say about this watch: “The present Charles Frodsham clock watch is a horological tour de force equal to and in some cases exceeding the innovation and craftsmanship found on the finest complicated wristwatches manufactured today,” and I could not agree more.

This is an example of complicated watchmaking not just at its most complicated, but also at its most refined and it is interesting to remember that in 1917, when this watch was cased, the world of complications manufacturing was a very different one. Modern high complications are designed and prototyped in CAD and these high powered simulation and computing tools have given us some of the most remarkable watches ever made, but long before Turing put computer science on a fundamental theoretical basis, complicated watches (and, for that matter, everything else mechanically complicated) was being designed by draftsmen and constructed by makers who were half artist, half engineer, and who were not interested in the difference between the two.