“The 'Marie-Antoinette' has been described as ‘the Mona Lisa of the clock world’.” House to various iconic figures, writers and composers throughout the previous two centuries. One of the most influential in helping to establish Breguet’s early reputation was Marie-Antoinette, the last queen of France (1755–1793). Though her husband King Louis XVI was also a client, it was the queen who took the young watchmaker under her wing and introduced him to the movers and shakers within her Versailles court. In 1782, Breguet produced a self-winding, striking calendar watch for Marie-Antoinette, his watch No. 2 10/82. But it was watch No. 160 – known to many simply as ‘the Marie-Antoinette’ – that would become considered to be one of the most important watches ever made. Constructed out of wood-polished pink gold, sapphires and blued steel, it has been described as ‘the Mona Lisa of the clock world’ and was designed to be the holy grail of watchmaking. Breguet received the commission in 1783 from an anonymous ‘Officer of the Queen’s Guard’. The brief was simple: that the watch would include every refinement and complication of watchmaking that had ever existed, with no limits set on when this masterpiece was to be completed by or at what cost. Mystery surrounds the identity of the commissioner. Some theorise that it was the queen
Above: Marie-Antoinette acquired a number of Breguet timepieces. With its clear face, No. 1160 (top) is a 21st-century reproduction of the original created for the French queen and is still considered the fifth most complicated watch in the world. Just below it is a reproduction of the Breguet No. 5, a self-winding ‘perpétuelle’ pocket watch
BREGUET’S MASTER STROKES BREGUET NO. 160
Better known as the ‘Marie-Antoinette’, this was released in 1827 and contained all the known complications of watchmaking of its time.
BREGUET NO. 1160
A reproduction of the iconic No. 160, today this watch is still considered as the fifth most complicated in the world.
BREGUET NO. 2639
The first-ever wristwatch, an ovalshaped complicated repeater model fitted onto a wristlet of twisted hair and gold thread, produced between 1810 and 1812 at the request of Caroline Murat.
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BREGUET NO. 4952
Produced by Louis-Antoine Breguet in 1830, this was the first keyless watch. It marked the birth of modern watch winding, introducing ‘the crown’ system of keyless stem winding and timesetting by way of a ‘knurled button’.
BREGUET NO. 5
A self-winding ‘perpétuelle’ pocket watch, with ‘à toc’ quarter repeater, a dial in silvered gold, engine-turned by hand, with recessed subdial for the seconds and a display of the phases and age of the moon and a 60 hour power-reserve indicator.
herself who ordered it but the most common (but unproven) explanation is that the brief came from a Swedish count, one Axel von Fersen, who was Marie-Antoinette’s close friend and reputed lover. Either way, neither of these individuals got to see the masterpiece, the design and manufacture of which was not completed until several decades later, long after the head-rolling days of the French Revolution. Indeed, it was Abraham-Louis’s son Louis-Antoine who completed it in 1827, four years after his father’s death. Within its 64mm diameter, this iconic ‘perpétuelle’ featured a self-winding mechanism equipped with a full platinum oscillating weight, and included a perpetual calendar indicating the day of the week, date and month, equation of time, repetition of minutes, quarters and hours, independent seconds hand, jumping hours and thermometer. Incidentally, the history of the watch was to prove as colourful as the life and death of its ill-fated namesake. Having been acquired by Salomons as the jewel in his glittering Breguet collection, its journey eventually brought it to the city of Jerusalem, to the L.A. Mayer Institute for Islamic Art. British master horologist George Daniels included it in his detailed 1980 study of the Breguet watches and clocks contained in the museum. It would appear that the catalogue may have come to the attention of the infamous Israeli thief, Na’aman Diller, because just three years after its publication, Diller pulled off one of the biggest heists to hit the world of horology. It took 25 years for the criminal investigation to nail the theft from the museum of over 100 timepieces on Diller – and in the end, it was his by-then-widow Nili Diller who took the rap.
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