“How do you read…that?”
The need to indicate the hour and minutes has sparked the creativity of watchmakers in myriad ways.
Some watches are not designed to give you the time straight, with a layout as instantly recognisable as the conventional three-hander. Maybe you have to figure it out from among two or three separate counters and subdials, like on regulator watches from Louis Erard. Maybe you have to read it off distinct gauges and scales, like on roller-display timepieces such as the Hublot MP- 10 Tourbillon Weight Energy System, or off wandering hours displays such as Urwerk’s UR-100. Maybe you even have to learn an entirely new method of reading time, to handle the Genus GNS1.2’s hour-ten minutes-single minute threeway-split display, or wrap your head around the Franck Muller Crazy Hours and its completely out of sequence numerals.
Among the watchmakers who have turned a display of time into their signature and leaned on it to advance their mythos, Van Cleef & Arpels’ mastery of the retrograde display stands as an example of the monumental trifecta of when creative vision and expression meet mechanical expertise and artistic prowess.
Love is one of the central themes of the maison, alongside nature and luck, and underpins a vast swathe of its creative endeavours since its founding, following the marriage between Alfred Van Cleef and Estelle Arpels in 1895. That same story of union and romance forms the foundation for the maison’s Pont des Amoureux series of watches. The linchpin of Van Cleef & Arpels’ Poetic Complications watch collection, the Pont des Amoureux has embraced the retrograde display since its debut in 2010. The double-retrograde movement drives two characters to advance towards each other from opposite sides of the dial over the course of 12 hours, and every day at noon and at midnight they reunite for three minutes at the middle of a Parisian bridge; an on-demand animation mechanism can replay the scene for 12 seconds. Over the years, the Pont des Amoureux series has grown, with watches depicting the city backdrop at various points during the day and night, and across the four seasons.
Read More: Van Cleef & Arpels’ Poetry of Time: An Enchanted Vision of Watchmaking
For Watches and Wonders Geneva 2025, it was the new Lady Arpels Bal des Amoureux Automate watch that signaled a fresh direction for Van Cleef & Arpels’ Pont des Amoureux storyline. Here, instead of on a bridge, the lovers’ reunion is set in a guinguette, an open-air dance café popular in the neighbourhoods surrounding Paris in the 19th century (depicted in contemporary artwork such as “Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette” by Renoir). Thanks to the double-retrograde system equipped with an automaton movement, the couple glide towards each other across white-gold cobblestones to hold hands and lean in for a kiss at noon and again at midnight. As with its predecessors, this rendezvous can be initiated on demand and activated via a button on the side of the case.
The delicate detail, where the figures’ articulated arms link and lower exactly as both characters lean towards each other, is deceptively simple: Creating this fluid sequence of movements that are minute yet exceedingly realistic, and natural-looking but do not affect the precision of the mechanism, required a novel movement, which took four years of research and development to create. The result is a self-winding movement with 36 hours of power reserve, and an added layer of complexity over the already mesmerising Pont des Amoureux series. Another update from the Pont des Amoureux: Instead of the couple themselves indicating the hour and minutes, in the Bal des Amoureux Automate watch, that task falls to two stars that skim across the top of the clouds.
To bring out the dramatic dimensionality of the scene, the maison called upon its master enamellers and miniature painters who made extraordinary use of the grisaille enamel technique, developed in 16th-century France. Using traditional grisaille enamel (applying white enamel powder) on the dark- blue background as well as coloured grisaille enamel (applying different tones of blue and yellow) enhances the perception of depth on the dial, by evoking chiaroscuro (Italian for “light-dark”, which describes a technique of using light and dark tones to convey a sense of volume, and was widely used by painters from the Renaissance through the 19th century, giving the dial a sense of three-dimensional depth that mirrors the drama and romance of Paris itself.
Read More: Van Cleef & Arpels on the Discipline Behind Creativity with Director Pascal Narbeburu
This story was first seen as part of the WOW Legacy 2025 Issue.
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