Open Face in 18ct Gold

By the late 1930s, Patek Philippe had spent nearly a century refining what it meant to make a pocket watch correctly, and the firms competing at the top were competing on quality alone. This watch is that idea in the metal: an open face of 43.9mm in 18 carat gold, the size the Swiss trade simply called a normal pocket watch, 54.1 grams of it, made around 1937 with the maker's full standard applied to a watch that has no complications to hide behind.

The dial is original white enamel with a subsidiary seconds register at six and a minute track of small raised enamel dots. The numerals are Breguet style Arabic figures, the elongated, flourished form Abraham-Louis Breguet introduced in the 1780s, and the gold hands match them, each drawn to a fine point with an open ring near the tip. The gilt of the numerals has oxidised over ninety years, and not evenly: each figure has taken its own colour, copper on the three, sea green on the four, a faint violet sheen on the nine. That spread of colour only happens when gilt is left completely alone for decades, and it cannot be copied onto a restored dial. Nothing here has been repainted or replaced.

The watch crossed the Atlantic through Patek Philippe's official American channel, the Henri Stern Watch Agency, and the stamp recording that journey is still on the caseback. The crystal is clear, the crown winds and sets correctly, and the movement runs.

The marks, the movement and the condition are set out piece by piece in the drawers below; the PXP import stamp and the archive record are set out in The Record.