Platinum Sapphire Dress Watch

Among the fine Geneva workshops of the 1920s, Niton was founded in 1919 by craftsmen trained at Vacheron Constantin, and it made movements for the names that mattered: Patek Philippe commissioned from the house, as did Cartier and Van Cleef and Arpels. Through the 1920s nearly three quarters of everything Niton made earned the Geneva Seal. This movement carries it.

The case is platinum, plain polished, 41mm across, and the setting is what sets the watch apart: a border of deep blue calibré-cut sapphires runs the full circumference of the case middle, continues over the bow, and finishes in a single cabochon on the tip of the crown. For all of that, it is a quiet object. The richness is held inside a strict Art Deco line, a fully gem-set watch that makes no effort to announce itself.

On the white enamel dial, its bold Breguet numerals read by blued steel Breguet hands with the open ring near the tip, in place of the maker's name stands the retailer's: Walser, Wald y Cia, Florida 664, Buenos Aires. Walser were the most distinguished watch house in South America between the wars and Patek Philippe's official Argentine representatives, a retailer whose Swiss commissions were built to their own specification. That it is their name on the dial, and not Niton's, says what kind of piece this was: ordered, not off the shelf, for a client who knew the difference.

A century is a long time for a gem-set watch to stay whole. Work of this kind tends to be taken apart over the years: stones reset, crowns lost, movements moved into other cases. This one is complete. Every sapphire is present, the dial and the sapphire-tipped crown are original, and the movement, numbered 9942, sits in the Geneva-made case it left the workshop in, with the seal of the Canton of Geneva on the plate to say so. It winds, sets and runs well.

The marks, the movement and the condition are set out piece by piece in the drawers below; the Buenos Aires retailer signature is recorded in The Record.