Gold Repoussé Pair Case, Signed for London

The back of the outer case is worked in repoussé, pushed up from inside and chased from the front, into a woman with both arms raised into a spray of foliage and a man in a cuirass and short tunic reaching after her, on a stippled ground inside a cartouche of rococo scrolls that gathers to a scallop shell at the base. The subject is almost certainly Apollo and Daphne, the pursuit that ends in the laurel, and the one the case chasers of the 1740s used more than any other because it gave them two figures in motion and a tree. The relief is still sharp. The high points of the figures carry only light wear and there are no holes or splits in the gold, which is where repoussé cases of this depth usually fail. Inside, the outer case keeps its old fabric lining, worn and marked, and its steel catch spring.

The inner case is plain polished gold, 42.21mm, with a hinged bezel carrying a bullseye glass that still has its soft distortion at the centre. The pendant and stirrup bow are gold. The outer case measures 48.15mm.

The dial is white enamel with black Roman hours inside an inner ring, and outside them the arcaded band, Arabic numerals 5 to 60 set between scalloped arches. That band is the mark of a watch made for the Dutch trade in the middle of the eighteenth century; buyers in the Republic expected it whatever name was on the back plate. The enamel is free of hairlines and chips. The hands are gold, the hour hand pierced in rococo scrollwork, the minute hand with a scrolled collar and a plain tapering blade.

The movement hinges out of the inner case. It is a gilt full plate verge with fusee and chain, square baluster pillars and blued steel screws, and the balance cock is the English type, a single broad foot with the table pierced and engraved in scrolling foliage and a scallop shell at the neck. Beside it sits the silvered regulator disc, numbered 1 to 6, and above it the oval reserve engraved in script: Baccuet London. The movement carries no number.

It winds smoothly, sets by key from the centre square and runs well, and both cases close tight. It comes in a later wooden presentation box with a ring key, neither of them period. The marks, the movement and the condition are set out in the drawers below.