The Audemars Piguet Edward Piguet Perpetual Calendar
A forgotten masterpiece from Audemars Piguet.
Audemars Piguet has been strongly associated with the Royal Oak and Royal Oak Offshore watches for many years, but it is only recently that AP’s become almost exclusively identified with those models. Of course, despite the long history of the Royal Oak, Audemars Piguet has made many other watches and its fame historically had more to do with the generally very high quality of its watchmaking, and more specifically, with its reputation as a maker of complicated watches, than with any product line in particular. It’s only within the last decade or so that the collections have become almost exclusively focused on the Royal Oak and the Offshore — and, in 2019, the Code 11.59 collection.
The Edward Piguet collection of watches was discontinued in the mid-2000s but it was for a time one of the core AP families, along with the also discontinued Jules Audemars line. In 2010, AP’s then CEO, Philippe Merk, described the AP product lines to ThePuristS.com (now PuristsPro): “There are four main axes of Product Development at Audemars Piguet: the Extreme Sports line with Offshore, the Prestige Sport line with Royal Oak, the Classical Contemporary line with Jules Audemars, Edward Piguet and the Millenary, and finally, the Millenary Ladies line for women. Each of these four axes embodies APs values of Tradition, Excellence and Daring. They all correspond to a strong demand on the market. In this perspective, we are not favoring any line but rather building our product offer with these four complimentary pillars.”
In the following 13 years, the design focus at AP has narrowed to two basic collections — you have the Royal Oak and Offshore lines (the Offshore’s a very different watch in some respects from the Royal Oak, but it’s clearly a direct offshoot from the latter) and the Code 11.59 collection. Code 11.59 does what the Edward Piguet and Jules Audemars watches used to do, which is offer a stylistic alternative to the Royal Oak, with an emphasis on complicated watches. However, what it doesn’t offer is what was the signature feature of the Edward Piguet line, which was a rectangular case.
Edward Auguste Piguet was one of the founders of Audemars Piguet, along with Jules Louis Audemars, and the two were both trained watchmakers, although once the company was officially founded in 1881, Piguet concentrated more on the sales and management side of the company. The Edward Piguet line and Jules Audemars lines were both created and named to honor the company founders and both lines were vehicles for both simple and very complicated watches.
Though for many newer collectors and enthusiasts, the Edward Piguet line is a footnote to the more prevalent narrative around the Royal Oak, I think it deserves wider recognition — the watches were of extremely high quality. In 2001, an Edward Piguet watch even won the Complicated Watch prize at the first edition of the Grand Prix Horlogerie de Genéve (this is the same year in which the Aiguille d’Or — the grand prize of the Grand Prix — went to the Vacheron Constantin Kalla high jewelry watch, which just goes to show you how times have changed in the last decade. I struggle to imagine a high jewelry watch winning the Aiguille d’Or today, no matter how deserving). That watch was the Edward Piguet Minute Repeater Carillon, which had a most unusual additional complication in the form of an indicator showing the duration of the hour, quarter hour, and minute strikes.
The Edward Piguet watches had in common highly polished, beautifully arched upper surfaces on the case flanks, and brushed finishing on the case sides, and the quality of the hands, dials, and movement finishing were exemplary. Last year, Tim Mosso did a video review of an Edward Piguet tourbillon, which was completed in 2000, and it’s very much worth watching if you’re interested in seeing just how high the standard was in movement finishing for the line.
Audemars Piguet’s reputation pre-Royal Oak — and for that matter, for quite a while after the debut of the Royal Oak — was very much based on its ability to make ultra-thin perpetual calendars, and it was rightly famous for the perpetuals based on the 2800 module (supplied by Dubois Depraz) and the ultra-thin caliber 2120. That movement was launched by AP in the ref. 5548, in 1979, right in the middle of the Quartz Crisis and it, and its automatic descendants, enjoy the lion’s share of attention from historians and collectors.
This Edward Piguet Perpetual, on the other hand, uses a hand-wound caliber: AP caliber 2003, which was launched in 1957 and which was also used by Vacheron Constantin (as the VC caliber 1003). The cal. 2003, at just 1.64mm thick, was for decades the world’s thinnest production hand-wound movement, and it’s here combined with the 2805 perpetual calendar module which increases the height of the movement only slightly, to 3.19mm. The movement is a very big part of what makes the Edward Piguet Perpetual special — it’s a pioneering caliber, a masterpiece of traditional ultra-thin Swiss watchmaking, and a quite rare example of a hand-wound perpetual in AP’s history of perpetual calendar wristwatches.
The dial of the watch is as traditional as you can get — there are four subdials, for the moonphase, date, day of the week, and month. While AP did make wristwatch perpetuals with leap year indications (including the 5516, and, beginning in 1995, in the Royal Oak perpetual calendars) the Edward Piguet Perpetual follows in the footsteps of the 2120/2800 automatics, which offers a more legible and generally cleaner dial, albeit at the expense of knowing when the leap year indication is supposed to kick in.
It’s a pleasantly slim, very wearable watch, and at 35mm x 27mm, a classically proportioned, extremely elegant timepiece as well. The Edward Piguet collection represents a real opportunity for the determined collector — there were relatively few of them made, and they were created in enough variety, and with enough complications, to make them fascinating to hunt down. They are still relatively undervalued as well — often, if you look carefully, you can find a watch like this one, which offers an enormous amount of real watchmaking content, for a fraction of what you’d pay for a comparable complication if it came in a Royal Oak case. And the designs are very seductive — they’re similar in some respects to the various Cartier Tank models but with their own particular details, including the alternating brushed and polished finishes on the case flank.
The Edward Piguet line in general, and the Edward Piguet Perpetual Calendar in particular, represent a way to experience elegant and creative design, along with real intellectual and historical value, for the street price you would pay for some much less interesting steel sports watches. You can start with the Edward Piguet Perpetual Calendar but you don’t have to stop there — tourbillon with rutilated quartz dial, anyone?
Good hunting.