Extra-Flat in 18ct Gold

Cartier built its reputation between the wars on watches that did less, more perfectly. This is one of them: an open face dress watch in 18ct yellow gold, 46.9mm across and remarkably shallow, made around 1925, when the flat gold watch was Cartier's answer for evening wear.

The case is the extra-flat bombe pattern, drawn in one unbroken curve from the polished bezel to the domed back, with no step or ornament to interrupt it. The bow is a plain gold oval, the crown finely fluted, and that is the whole vocabulary of the outside. Cartier left the back plain, and no owner in a hundred years added a monogram: the mirror of gold is as the Paris workshop released it.

The dial is silvered rather than enamel, the modern choice for the period, with black Roman numerals set inside a railway minute track and the Cartier signature written in script across the centre. There is no seconds hand. The symmetry is the point: nothing moves on this dial but the two blued steel Breguet-style hands.

Underneath sits the reason this generation of Cartier is judged by what is inside. The movement was made for Cartier alone by the European Watch & Clock Co. and engraved with the highest grade that company used: eighteen jewels, adjusted eight ways, a specification reserved for watches expected to keep time seriously rather than simply to dress well. The same signature is stamped inside the French gold case, so the piece carries its originality on both halves, case and calibre answering each other.

At 46.9mm it is a large example of the type, with real presence in the hand for something so thin. It winds, sets and runs as it should, and it has kept the crispness that these plain gold cases usually lose first: the stamps inside the back read as sharply as the day they were struck.

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