The Blue Enamel Minute Repeater

This is a dress watch built around a minute repeater, and its maker gave the case as much attention as the movement. The cushion was the fashionable outline for a gentleman's evening watch in the 1920s, a softened square that lay flat in the pocket of a dinner jacket, and here it is worked in two colours of 18ct gold: white for the body and the plain brushed back, yellow for the frames that hold them.

The enamel is what separates it from the plain-cased repeaters of the period. A continuous band of scrolling foliage, cut into the yellow gold and filled with deep blue, runs around the front bezel, repeats around the back bezel and carries on across the bow, so the decoration reads the same from every side. It is complete, without chips or losses. On a case carried for a century, the bezel and bow are where enamel is lost first, and here both are whole.

The dial follows the outline of the case rather than sitting as a circle inside it; even the subsidiary seconds at six is drawn as a small cushion. The numerals are the block Arabic figures of the decade, black with a drawn shadow, on a silvered ground inside a railway minute track, read by blued steel hands, each with an open ring set just short of the tip. Nothing on the dial carries a name, which leaves the case and the numerals to set the period.

A slide in the band sets the repeater sounding the time to the minute: the hours on a low gong, the quarters on both gongs and the minutes on a high gong. The round movement sits inside the cushion with the gongs coiled around its edge, and the case keeps proportions made for evening wear.

Frésard was a Lucerne house, but this watch was made for export to the United States. Its movement carries the engraving that United States customs required of imported Swiss movements in the 1920s.

The marks, the movement and the condition are set out in the drawers below.