Self-Winding Perpétuelle

An open-face watch in 18ct gold, 48.34mm across and 91.1 grams in the hand, engine-turned across the bezel, the band and the hinged back that lifts to the movement, the back worked around a plain polished cartouche, with the pendant and bow left in polished gold. It is a Perpétuelle, a watch that winds itself from the motion of being carried, and that word is the whole story.

Self-winding was Abraham-Louis Breguet's founding trick, the invention that made his name in Paris in the 1780s, and for most of a century afterwards the house let it rest. Then, in 1921, Sir David Salomons published his monograph on Breguet and reminded the world, and the firm itself, of what the old man had actually done. In the years that followed, the house answered with a small run of new Perpétuelles built in honour of its own beginning, and this is one of them: No. 2176, made around 1930, bracketed in the series by No. 1648 of 1928 and No. 2492 of 1932. The movements for the run came from Les Fils de V. Piguet in the Vallée de Joux, then trusted with the most demanding complicated work in Switzerland.

The silvered dial is guilloché throughout, worked in a tighter weave at the centre than the case carries, with a plain satin band holding the Roman hours and a beaded minute track just inside it. Hours and minutes sit a little high of centre, read by blued steel hands in the moon-tipped Breguet pattern, and beneath them a separately pivoted hand sweeps an arc graduated to fifty, showing how much running reserve the motion of the day has stored. A subsidiary seconds turns in its own guilloché ring at six.

On the other side of the hinged back, the self-winding weight rides on its own pivot at the top of the movement, and it is cut in platinum: the densest metal for the job, on a watch whose whole purpose is that weight's quiet travel. It winds and sets correctly from the gold pendant crown, and it runs well.

The house's own registers know this watch: sold new on the 21st of February 1933 to a Monsieur Lenoir, for 10,000 francs. It has come through the ninety years since complete, matching and original, the number struck on caseback, cuvette and movement, and the caseback's central cartouche, the panel left for an owner's monogram, never engraved.

The marks, the movement and the condition are set out piece by piece in the drawers below; the register entry, confirmed by the house, is set out in The Archive.