A sale that will likely run collectors of replica Patek Phillippe and Rolex up against connoisseurs of watch history, anxious to make the personal acquaintance of a watch that might not set the wider world alight, but does represent one of the most significant staging posts on the journey of the wristwatch from useful, time-only personal effect to heirloom and artwork combined.
In tandem, these qualities describe what’s thus attractive about a complication that, for most watch lovers, constitutes their first “affair”: refinement (speaking to the chorological skill required to make superbly accurate timekeepers) and legibility (recognizing their role as one of the first “tool” replica watches – the category that gave birth to today’s all-conquering sports watch). By selecting a relative handful – 88 in total – to represent Phillips’ first ever chronograph-only auction, it takes place in Geneva next month.
Originally a term used to describe a device capable of recording elapsed time using a pen and ink system – quite literally chrono-graph – with the advent of mass mobilization. By the Fifties, these tool watches entered the mainstream, thanks to accurate and above all reliable movements from a host of watch makers, many of whom sadly wouldn’t survive the quartz crisis of the early Eighties.
Both civil and military, the need to measure often lengthy time-periods accurately gave voice to a number of manufactures anxious to perfect what some might argue is a timepiece’s most useful secondary function.
All cases are in the genuine tool watch’s material of choice: stainless steel. Phillips is showing that its dedicated replica watch department, set up in 2014 by expert auctioneer Aurel Bacs, is nothing if not purist: merely ‘true’ chronographs have been listed (so no lunar calendars known as ‘moon phases’) creeping in.
The result: ask Paul Maudsley, international specialist director of the London watches department at Phllips’ Auction House on Berkeley Sqaure, what constitutes a “collectible” chronograph, and he’ll say a level of refinement and superior legibility.
