Five-Sided 'Tombstone'

By the early 1920s the pocket watch had long settled into its shape. Art Deco geometry was running through everything else on the jeweller's counter, wristwatches, cigarette cases, vanity cases, but the watch that went into a waistcoat pocket stayed a circle. This one did not. The case is cut with five straight sides, the outline the period trade called a tombstone, taller than it is wide, with the gold bow passing straight through the top edge rather than hanging from a round pendant. There is no ornament beyond the geometry itself: a plain polished bezel, flat polished gold, and edges that still meet crisply a century on. Fancy-form cases were made in small numbers, usually to a jeweller's order, and few were made in solid 18ct gold. On this watch the shape is the point, and everything else is built to serve it.

The dial holds the same discipline. It is silvered with a fine grained finish that shifts in raking light, and the numerals are applied gold Arabics in the tall, narrow style of the decade, drawn out to follow the case rather than fight it. A railroad minute track follows the five-sided outline inside them, and at six sits a sub-seconds register that is itself five-sided, the case shape echoed in miniature. Nothing on the front is printed where it could be built: the numerals stand proud of the silver in solid gold, and the hands are gold too, each pierced with an open lozenge near the tip. The crown is fluted gold, small and correct for a dress watch.

The back is a plain polished field with a single engraving at its centre: three interlaced letters in an angular Art Deco hand, cut in the same straight-edged style as the case, so the initials read as part of the design rather than an afterthought. They have not been identified.

It weighs 56.2 grams, most of it gold, and carries that weight in a case sized for a waistcoat pocket. The flat surfaces catch light differently from a round case, in planes rather than a single curve, and that is the pleasure of the form: a century old, and still an unusual thing to take out of a pocket.

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