Chronomètre Royal

A Chronomètre Royal was Vacheron's precision instrument rather than its jewellery, and everything about this one says so. It is a large watch, 56.4mm in solid 18ct gold, the size the period trade sold as a Goliath, with real weight in the hand. Yet the design is quiet: a plain polished bezel around the dial, and all of the case's decoration saved for the back, a single field of engine-turned sunburst radiating from an oval cartouche at its lower edge. That cartouche was put there for a monogram, and in more than a hundred years nobody ever cut one into it.

The white enamel dial is deep and glassy, with black Roman numerals, a fine outer minute track and subsidiary seconds at six, the maker's signature in small black script across the centre. It is free of hairlines, chips and restoration; enamel of this age rarely comes through unmarked, and this one has. Gold poire hands with a matching gilt seconds hand, original to the watch.

Inside, the gilded movement sits beneath a solid gold cuvette, hand-engraved with the maker's name, so that dial, movement and cover all speak with one voice. Everything the watch left Geneva with is still here, matching and unrestored: nothing swapped, nothing polished away, nothing added in the century between. It winds, sets and runs as it should.

Few of the large gold examples survive with the enamel whole and every signature in place, and they are the ones that rarely come to market intact. This one has been kept, plainly and well, the entire time.

The marks, the movement and the condition are set out piece by piece in the drawers below; the three signatures are recorded in The Record.