Gold and Enamel Verge with Split Pearl Border

The scene is the reason this watch exists. On the back, within a raised gold frame, a young woman in a yellow tunic tied with a blue sash stands before a garlanded altar, a basket of flowers on her arm, a lamb on a blue ribbon at her heel and a small child at her side. Flowers are heaped on the altar. One dove sits among them, another hovers above with wings spread, and the two touch beaks. Behind, on the right, is a round colonnaded temple. It is an offering at the altar of Love: the billing doves are the birds of Venus, the round temple is the Temple of Love of the period's gardens, and the girl brings what a shepherdess had to give, flowers and a lamb. The subject was a favourite of Paris print-sellers in the 1770s and 80s, in pastorals after Jean-Baptiste Huet and in the Greek-dressed offerings after Vien, and the enamel painters who worked for the Paris trade drew on those prints freely. The painting is unsigned, as watch-case enamels of this date nearly always are. The painter has set it against a cream enamel ground laid over engine turning, so the sky radiates faintly from behind the figures. Around it runs a border of split pearls, green enamel leaves and dots of translucent blue, complete, and around that a chased band of laurel. The small gold stud at the border's edge is the latch that opens the case.

The front is quieter. A white enamel dial with painted Arabic numerals and blued steel hands, wound with a key through the small aperture at 2, in the French manner. The pendant is a T-bar with a folding bow, and the band of that bow is engraved with digits matching the number inside the watch: case and movement have kept each other's company since the workshop.

The movement is a gilt full plate verge, its bridge cock pierced and engraved, with a silvered rosette regulator disc lettered A and R for avance and retard. It is signed in script, Berthoud, A Paris, No. 11711, and it winds, sets and runs.

At some point in its French life, after 1838 by the mark it carries, the watch was fitted with a glazed silver gilt outer case, a plain working shell with glass on both sides, so the enamel could be seen without being handled. The gilding on that case is rubbed from use. The enamel it was made to protect is not.

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