Important Collectors’ Wristwatches, P...

Geneva, Hotel Du Rhone, Apr 02, 2006

LOT 423

?Diamond-Set Balance? Swiss. Made for the Chinese market, circa 1810. Very fine and very rare, 18K pink gold, center dead seconds watch with Pouzait escapement, date, eccentric dial and diamond-set balance wheel.

CHF 8,000 - 12,000

108 5,000 - 8,000

Sold: CHF 12,980

C.Two-body, ?Directoire?, glazed on both sides. Gilt brass dust ring. D. White enamel, eccentric radial Roman chapter set in the lower half with outer minute divisions and Arabic 15 minute numerals, winding aperture, subsidiary date dial at 12 o'clock, center seconds with outermost divisions and 15-second Arabic numerals. Gold "beetle and poker" hour and minute hands, blued steel date and second hands. M. 50 mm., gilt brass full plate, fixed barrel, slow-beat Pouzait lever escapement with large diamond-set balance with four spiral arms set on the backplate, index regulator. Diam. 59 mm. To be sold without reserve


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Grading System
Grade: AA

Very good
Case: 3

Good
Movement: 3*

Good

Overhaul recommended, at buyer's expense
Dial: 3-25-01

Good

Chipped

HANDS Original

Notes

Pouzait (also Pouzzait or Puzait, 1743-1793) In 1786 Jean Moyse Pouzait presented a model of his lever escapement to the Geneva Society of Arts. The idea seems to derive from the pin-wheel escapement in clocks and as in pin-wheel there was no safety action (later ones, including the present watch have the safety action). There are some differences, Pouzait's pallets being not just pins, but small pin-like rectangular teeth, so that this is in fact an escapement with divided lift. Pouzait, who eleven years earlier had invented the independent seconds mechanism, possibly wanted to make a simpler dead seconds mechanism. Whatever his motives were, he was one of the first to introduce the lever escapement to the Continent. See: Dictionnaire des horlogers genevois, by Osvaldo Patrizzi, Antiquorum Editions, 1998. This lot was previously sold by Antiquorum, Geneva, in April, 2003, lot 372.