UNFURLING ITS GOLDEN WINGS
With this new version of its fabulous automaton timepiece, the La Chaux-de-Fonds watchmaker embraces a poetic interlude, a marvelous galaxy nestling in a case, inviting fantasy to run free.
Nature has forever been a creative cornerstone for Jaquet Droz, from the moment Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721-1790) set up his workshop where he fashioned his first watchmaking pieces when he was just 17 years old through to the current day and the current firm. Love and the metaphors it inspires are also at the heart of this delicately-poetic watchmaking, illustrated through the new Loving Butterfly Chinchilla Red, an automaton watch proposed in a highly-limited 28-piece edition.
This watch is based on the famous “The Butterfly driven by love” sketch, a lepidoptera pulling Cupid along on a chariot, and invites us to discover a three-dimensional, red-gold sculpted version powered by an automaton movement. You just need to press the push-piece integrated in the crown to admire the wheels turning and the wings unfurling in perfect harmony. The scenescape is set on a Chinchilla Red backdrop, wood petrified by fossilized lava ash, originating somewhere in the extreme East of Australia and dating back to… 150 million years ago! This extremely rare mineral, with its russet mahogany glints and veined like a Havana cigar leaf, features a series of red-gold sculpted trees on either side of the dial, encircling the chariot and the butterfly. An onyx disc, off-centered towards 12 o’clock, displays the hours and minutes hovered over by a pair of Lancine-style hands.
The Loving Butterfly Chinchilla Red 43 mm-diameter, 16.63 mm-thick red gold case encloses the Jaquet Droz 2653 ATI caliber, a self-winding movement which delivers a power reserve of 68 hours and wraps round the wrist with a black alligator strap attached by a folding clasp.
So as to render to the Earth what it gifts us with, a percentage of this watch’s sales will be donated to associations working to reforest and to preserve local species in Australia, a country severely affected by fires since summer 2019.
Price: CHF129,600 jaquet-droz.com
By Sharmila Bertin