Breguet N°675

A long time ago...

Back in my early days of collecting watches, I once ran into the web page of a dealer in the US who was selling a Breguet "répetition à toc". The dial had been reglazed, partially obscuring the secret signature which is so typical of Breguet's enamel dial watches, but the price listed was so good I decided to try to buy the watch anyway. Needless to say, by the time I got in touch with the dealer, I found out that the watch was long gone...

I did not end up with a Breguet watch that day, but the experience left me with the yearning to one day be able to hold in my hands (and put in my pocket) an original Breguet watch of pre-1823 manufacture, when there was still a chance that the Master himself had at some point laid hands on it.

This desire went unfulfilled for many years. Of course Antiquorum and other auction houses started offering more and more of his original pieces for sale, but the hammer prices on these wacthes seemed stuck (and still are!) in a perpetual uphill climb, which was basically making the thought of ever owning one more and more remote as time went by.

Present day...

Imagine my surprise, then, when last Saturday I saw an auction page on the net offering an original Breguet watch for sale. This no longer had its original case, but came with an extract from the Breguet archives signed by no other than Mr. Emmanuel Breguet, curator of the Breguet archives. Knowing him well, I figured that if he had been "fooled" into thinking that it was an authentic Breguet watch, there could not possibly be too much wrong with it.

I quickly got in touch with the seller to ask him a few questions, and before you know it, since the action was still very far from reaching the watch's actual reserve price, we had agreed upon an amount and the watch was mine! Now, as you will see, the watch has a few unusual characteristics, which made me wonder how much of it was actually original! As another of our moderators remarked the other day, you sometimes see Breguet watches where the only original thing left is the mainplate.

Waiting for the watch to be delivered, I immediately embarked upon a careful study of all the Breguet watch illustrations I could lay my hands upon, and off the shelf came my Salomons' books, the two Art of Breguet by Daniels and Antiquorum (ex Habsburg), Emmanuel's book, and a large assortment of other Antiquorum catalogues.

Similar watches, with similar movements, can be found both in Daniels' The Art of Breguet (Breguet N°731, sold in 1800, p. 182) and in the Habsburg (now Antiquorum) Art of Breguet catalogue (Breguet N°702, sold in 1801, pp. 81-2), where the movement is almost identical, with the exception of the lack of parachute.

The first thing I noticed, however (and which indeed proved correct), is that the minute hand is no longer original. It's too bad that the original hand got lost (or damaged), but out of all the things which could be missing, this is not the worst!!!

Another original piece which is missing, and which is slightly more bothersome, is the Breguet-style stopworks of the mainspring barrel, which were first replaced with a Maltese-cross style set-up (with the milling of a second slot on the barrel), and then simply scrapped altogether. This extra milling is not uncommon, and many exemples can actually be found where this has been done (see Breguet N°2842, sold in 1815, illustrated in picture 253b, p. 231 of Daniels' the Art of Breguet, for one such watch).

Things got stranger when I began looking at the characteristics of the movement itself. First of all, I noticed that the mainplate did not bear the typical "flourished" Breguet signature with the number of the watch. This doubt, however, was quickly dispelled, as the Daniels' book clearly states that after 1794 Breguet seldom signed his movements, preferring instead to stamp them on the dial-side with the number of the watch. The stamped number was there (and was the right one!), so at least the mainplate was original!

I then turned my attention to the "parachute", which clearly did not have the elegant shape of all the ones I had seen before. Moreover, this one was screwed on the underside of the balance wheel bridge, whereas Breguet had been known to screw them on top, making a small "arch" in the regulation arm to go over the base of the parachute. To be perfectly honest, my theory was that the watch had taken a very bad fall, which had damaged both the case and parachute, resulting in both being scrapped and remade. This seemed to be comforted as well by the apparent lack of jewelling on the parachute, which was something that Breguet had never been known to do.

I first got an inkling that I might have been wrong in my thinking when I noticed that the regulation arm did indeed have the "bulge" normally used to go over the base of the parachute, but that in this instance it had not been hollowed out, leading me to think that the parachute had always been intended to be fixed under the bridge. A macro lens with a bellows later allowed me to see that there was indeed a jewel in the parachute, albeit pale and small, thus comforting me even more in the novel idea that it just might be original...

I hit paydirt on page 185 of Daniels' The Art of Breguet. There, one can clearly see Breguet N°874, sold in 1802, which has an identical parachute, which Daniels describes as an "early form" of Breguet's parachute. On the same page, Breguet N°879, sold in 1802, also has a similar parachute, and in both instances these are screwed on the underside of the balance wheel bridge! It would thus appear that my wacth was among the first to be fitted with this genial invention of Abraham Louis Breguet! Nice.

The only other strange thing which remained to be elucidated is the presence of a "jump" hour hand on a simple watch. Indeed, Breguet is known for using this feature mostly on his repeaters, since one of the parts necessary for the repeating works lends itself well for this purpose. According to a friend, who spends his days restoring antique Breguet watches, this may actually turn out to be a movement on which Breguet was "experimenting" with the jump hour mechanism... a look in the manufacturing archives may one day shed light on this issue.

Whatever the truth may be, Daniel's The Art of Breguet shows the dial side of the movement of Breguet N°942, sold in 1805 (see illustration 153c on p. 186), where the space for this device has clearly been milled out of the mainplate, without the starwheel and spring having actually been fitted to the movement. I suppose that this would tend to prove that on occasion Breguet did put the jump hour feature on his simple watches.

So, what did I end up with?

According to the extract from the Breguet archives, this watch was originally sold in 1802 (the 10th year of the French revolution) to a Colonel Browne for 768 FF. The movement was housed at the time in an 18kt gold case, made by Mermillod, which was somehow lost/damaged and replaced with a silver case, whose Chester hallmarks date it to 1893.

The "montre simple, nouveau calibre" and the ruby cylinder escapement mentioned in the sales records identify this as a second class watch, with the movement mostly made in Breguet's workshops. This represents the third generation of watch movements employed by Breguet.

Strangely enough, according to Daniels, these are the rarest among Breguet watches. As repeaters were far more popular at the time (being functional also in the dark), apparently Breguet made very few "simple" watches which told only the time (besides his one-hand souscription watches, obviously).

The enamel dial is the original one made by Borel, and is signed and numbered on its reverse side. Though lightly scratched as any dial having lived through 200+ years of history can be, it is miracolously free of any hairline cracks! It also has the secret signature at 12 o'clock, with the same number as the movement.

What now?

Well, the idea would be to have the movement fully cleaned and restored, reconstructing the few parts which are missing in the same style as used by Breguet at the time (minute hand and barrel stopworks).

I would then have a new gold case made like the Breguet watches of that period (1801-3). However, I have no intention of making a "fake" case which could be passed off as the original one, so my idea would be to fit it with a sapphire back, so as to allow the easy and safe oogling of the wonderfully simple and symmetric Breguet movement inside. :-)

AlbertoS

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Copyright May 2004 by Alberto Schileo - all rights reserved