It is described as the most famous watch in the world. Some say it is the most valuable.
And now, for the first time in decades, the pocket watch that Abraham-Louis Breguet made for Marie Antoinette from the house in Israel for the public exhibition, in London.
Much mystery surrounds the timepiece, which Breguet (the brand) calls No. 160. In 1783, Breguet (the man) was instructed to create it, but today nobody knows for sure who placed the order. Some assume that the count was Axel von Fersen, the Swedish nobleman who was the most avid admirers of the queen; The official history of the Breguet Watch brand attributs it To one of the queen guards.
The order was simple, the brand said: the watch had to be the most complicated and impressive timepiece ever made and the budget was unlimited.
The 18-carat gold of 63 millimeters is anything but simple. It has a transparent dial, which was very rare at the time, and has several complications, including a minute of repeater, which invests the hour, the quarter and minute with different tones; a perpetual calendar; a comparison of the time screen, which indicates the difference between the local time and the time indicated by the sun; a thermometer; an automatic winding mechanism; and a 48-hour power reserve indicator.
“It is an absolute masterpiece,” wrote Emmanuel Breguet, a direct descendant of Abraham-Louis and the brand’s heritage director, in an e-mail. “It summarizes all expertise in the field of Abraham-Louis Breguet’s watch. It has an incredible number of complications, and it remained the most complicated watch ever made for a hundred years. “
Many in the Watch World consider Breguet, who opened his studio in Paris in 1775, as the largest watchmaker of all time in the industry. He created the first automatically winding pocket watch; the first Tourbillon, which encounters the effects of gravity on time that retain accuracy; the first shock absorption system; The first chiming gongs; And a hair spring design that bears its name and stays in widespread use today.
Marie Antoinette has never seen the completed watch; She was executed in 1793 during the French Revolution. It was completed by the Breguet team in 1827, 44 years after the committee and four years after the founder’s own death.
The Breguet company held the watch until 1887, when it was sold. Eventually it and the rest of a large watch collection were donated to the La Mayer Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem, which has now borrowed it for “Versailles: Science and Splendor”, an exhibition in the Science Museum in London until 21 April ( (The exhibition also includes other horological attractions such as the clock of the creation of the world, an astronomical timepiece designed by Claude-Siméon Passemant in 1754.)))
The idea of bringing the watch to London was in the making for many years, said Sir Ian Blatchford, the director of the Science Museum.
But “it was really in perhaps in the last two years that I started to seriously think that there was actually a nice link between our desire to borrow the Breguet and this exhibition,” Sir Ian said. “When we talked to the museum in Jerusalem for the first time about borrowing the watch, their reaction was extremely careful.”
It is not uncommon for the world’s most important watches to be kept far from public, either as part of private collections or held by watch brands themselves. In the case of the Marie Antoinette watch: “It was the policy of the board of directors not to lend it,” says Gilad Levian, the Chief Executive of the Museum of Islamic Art since April 2021. “But we have it changed. “
Although he noticed, “it took us about three years to get to this point.”
The restraint of the board was somewhat justified, given that a large part of the museum’s watch collection, including the Marie Antoinette Watch, was stolen in 1983 and the recovery negotiations did not start until 2006, noted Jenia Frumin, one Senior guide in the museum that is known as something of an expert in the field of the watch collection. “You have to remember that after the fact that those pieces were missing for 23 years, the museum was a bit stressed about the idea of taking them somewhere else.”
During the robbery, the thief dismantled a ventilation axis to gain access to the display hall, which Mr. Frumin described as “only a simple hall with deserved glass boxes and no cameras.” The Trek included 106 watches and clocks, about half of them through Breguet.
An investigation by the Israeli police turned out not to be decisive. But in 2006, when the widow of a well-known Israeli thief named Na’aman Diller tried to sell four Breguet Pocket watches, the mystery unraveled. In the next two years, with the leadership of Interpol, most timepieces were found from safes and safes in Israel, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States.
While the Breguet watches, including the Marie Antoinette, were not damaged, “about half of what he stole – more than 40 pieces – were completely dismantled, to the smallest mechanical detail,” said Mr. Frumin. “They were held in packages of old medicine, waffles, chocolates, cornflakes, every possible small box that was there, repackaged and documented by hand.” Documents described the thief’s plan to put together some of them in different configurations and then to sell them, although he was known that he had successfully sold only two, with the help of forged documents.
Although the thief did not dismantle the Marie Antoinette, he did not maintain it, so some of his complications no longer work.
“We have had a policy since I started in the museum,” said Mr Levian, “that we don’t really repair the Breguet or try to repair.”
Sir Ian expressed a similar opinion: “I was reluctant to go that route, because what was most important to me was the watch, but you could say that it is a lot of unfinished things.
“When we looked at it – with a little help from Emmanuel – we thought that the restoration project would last at least two years. It is somewhat irresistible, isn’t it, to see and hear it ticking again? But that is a price for someone else instead of me, I think. “
Moreover, it turned out to be difficult to get the Marie Antoinette to London.
Even after the board of the art museum was agreed to the loan, Mr Levian had what he described as ‘one big problem’.
“Israel is at war,” he said, “and when you’re at war, you can’t have an insurance against war and terror. So we had an emergency meeting and decided that the watch would go without it. We have it on a flight to London Bought and taken all possible measures to keep it safe.
The Science Museum also had a big problem. While a compensation program supported by the government includes all major treasures on loan for display in Great Britain, “you have to work out a rating,” said Sir Ian. “Trying to agree for the Breguet 160 is much more difficult than for an old master painting, where market prices are fairly clear.”
When promoting the exhibition before the opening on December 12, Sir Ian said, he was reluctant to put the financial value of the watch in the spotlight and preferred to emphasize its historical significance. But earlier estimates varied from $ 30 million to $ 100 million. “If it went to an auction, what it will never do,” he said, “there is almost no limit to what it would be worth. People start to break out in a sweat and just think about it.” In the end, a number became agreed, but one that he refused to make known.
As soon as the London exhibition ends, the watch must be returned to Jerusalem. But now that it has been borrowed, Sir Ian says that he is optimistic that it will soon be on the road again, because the Science Museum will be talking about sending the entire exhibition to other museums.
“Prior to the recent war in Israel and Gaza,” he said, “Our Spirit was focused on the cultural issues and opportunities that would result from the Abraham chords between Israel and certain Gulf States. Some of us hope that that is actually still feasible can be.
The possibility of further exhibition is something that Mr Levian would also welcome.
“We have already had some negotiations before we have Japan Covid,” he said. “It’s great to have some Artefact that one hundred thousand people will come to your museum to see, but it’s not about ego.
“It has been here in Israel for the past 20 years. We had our time. Now it’s time to travel and to be different everywhere in the world. “
