Although Jean-Marc Vacheron made a watch with an openworked and engraved balance cock in 1755, it wasn’t until 1924 that his namesake company, then called Vacheron & Constantin, created its first fully skeletonized pocket watch. Placed into a rock crystal case, the movement was encircled with a platinum ring and then set with sapphires from Burma.
For the wrist, however, the vintage is more recent, as the manufacture created a small number of open-worked wristwatches in the mid-1960s, increasing production most notably in the 1970s when it began to skeletonize its well-known ultra-thin Caliber 1003, adding the SQ (to indicate squelette, French for skeleton) to the movement name.
By the mid-1990s, Vacheron Constantin’s brand of elaborately engraved and chamfered openwork watches drew scores of collectors, many of whom sought (and continue to seek) the company’s skeletonized Malte tourbillons, minute repeaters and perpetual calendars as among the finest examples of Swiss horological artistry.
When Vacheron Constantin debuted significant openworked calibers at this past SIHH in Geneva, collectors reacted with glee. The company this year adds skeletonized models in three different collections: Traditionnelle, Malte and Métiers d’Art, while also expanding its design palette to include new sculptural skeletonizing techniques that combine with the artistry for which Vacheron Constantin is already well-known, such as the use of grand feu enamel and detailed engraving.
“We have been working on our skeletonized calibers since 1924,” explains Vacheron Constantin North America president Vincent Brun. “The idea here is to reinforce our tradition of focusing on traditional craftsmanship.”
Métiers d’Art
Pocket watch movements were made slimmer during the latter decades of the 19th century and into the 20th century, in part echoing the mood of the architecture of the late industrial revolution. Buildings and especially the world’s premier transportation hubs were being built at this time with airy arches inspired by Gothic designs.
European and American train stations, for example, featured glass domes, streamlined ribbed vaults and latticework beams designed to create a lighter and brighter atmosphere for travelers. Indeed, the era’s faster public pace altered how many travelers regarded time from day to day as large, easily read clocks set to the newly standardized times dominated rail hubs, which themselves were more open to the outdoors and likely to expose their beams to show their intricate construction.
This era, and its Gothic underpinnings, inspired Vacheron Constantin as it considered the designs for its latest Métiers d’Art collection called Mécaniques Ajourées (ajourée is French for “openworked;” one model graces the cover of this issue). Vacheron Constantin wanted to evoke the airiness with an openworked version of its manual Caliber 4400, but also decided to add a sculptural element to the process to create a three-dimensional result.
Volume and depth
Instead of engraving only on the surface of the movement’s plates, Vacheron Constantin’s artisans have carefully chased the parts around their full circumference to create a true sculpture with its own volume and depth. They have engraved and cut delicate arches on the caliber, resulting in a rounded and curved series of tiny beams. These rounded shapes are a dramatic change from the straight lines of classic openworked movements.
“This new method is a complex process of chamfering and hand-drawing,’’ explains Christian Selmoni, Vacheron Constantin artistic director. “This type of bridge engraving is contrary to the logic of the watchmaker. The idea is to let the light enter the movement and reflect. Our engraver said that in thirty years of doing this he’s never been asked to engrave this way before.”
To Selmoni, the new method still demonstrates that Vacheron Constantin is creating in a classic way.
“You see three-dimensional engraving inside that creates a sculpture more than an engraving. Our Patrimony is a very strict design, almost German, but this is so different. To create skeletons offers us another playground for creativity. We are doing something we have been doing for decades, but doing it in a totally different manner.”
The engravers create interlacing patterns of interior angles where the polished zones catch the light while the matte finish of the hand-drawn surfaces heighten the contrast. With finishing, each artisan spends three days on an individual caliber.
For many, openworked models can be a challenge to read, but Selmoni feels that issue is addressed successfully with these new Mécaniques Ajourées models in part do to his designers’ attention to the overall balance of the piece.
“You have to find a balance between aesthetics and function,” he notes. “The balance between thinness and diameter on this watch is very good. When we developed the 4400 movement in the skeleton version we spoke with the Research & Development department and said we don’t want the movement to be developed with a space for a dial, even a sapphire crystal dial, so in fact we are gaining 0.5 mm with this movement in its skeleton version, which makes a difference.”
The resulting case is the thinnest possible for the movement, he adds, which offers the wearer a readable and pleasing balance.
Vacheron Constantin has placed carefully enameled colored rings around the defining openwork in these Métiers d’Art Mécaniques Ajourées models. Available with a black, blue or grey grand feu enameled ring, the new pieces are also accented with Roman numerals that evoke the larger numerals seen overhead at the railway stations that inspired the watch’s design.
In a high jewelry version, the Métiers d’Art Mécaniques Ajourées adds yet another artistic craft: gem-setting. One version is set with forty-two baguette-cut diamonds on the bezel, echoed by the twelve baguette-cut diamonds set on the clasp of the saddle-stitched hand-sewn alligator leather strap.
The watches are made only in white gold, which Selmoni says is “aesthetically more discreet than rose gold. Platinum raises the price so we kept that for the Malte and the Patrimony models.” And of course, the watches are each certified by the Hallmark of Geneva.
Patrimony Traditionnelle 14-day Tourbillon
You may recall that the first watch to meet the new requirements of the Hallmark of Geneva several years ago was Vacheron Constantin’s Traditionnelle 14-day Tourbillon with the firm’s Calibre 2260 movement. The movement features four barrels mounted in coupled pairs that are all connected and slowly unwind simultaneously.
This year, that watch movement receives its SQ, or squelette, designation, as it is the center of the new Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle 14-day Tourbillon Openworked. In order to re-create the watch with the new skeletal design, Vacheron Constantin decided to forgo conventional methods. Rather than strictly following outlines of the caliber’s existing mainplate and hollowed bridges, as is common when initiating an openwork design, Vacheron Constantin instead carved its own angles, ignoring the caliber’s original shapes.
“The 14-days power reserve Traditionnelle 14-day Tourbillon Openworked tourbillon has been the most creative because it’s almost transgressive,” says Selmoni. “Underlying the round movement we have shapes and have created angles.” Gothic motifs embellish the four mainsprings while matte and polished curves allow the light to play off the watch in different ways as it is viewed throughout the day.
The complex caliber requires Vacheron Constantin designers and finishers to spend an average two months to create each piece before it is handed to the finishers, who then require long hours of hand-drawing, chamfering and engraving on each of several layers. Compared with the solid base movement, a single 2260 SQ caliber requires ten additional hours of chamfering and hand drawing, as well as forty extra hours of engraving.
Without a central dial, the 42mm platinum-cased Traditionnelle 14-day Tourbillon Openworked model instead features a slate-grey ring around its inner rim, set with white gold hour-markers. The tourbillon carriage at 6 o’clock (with the small seconds hand) spins over a familiar Vacheron Constantin Maltese Cross.
Malte Tourbillon
Recalling Vacheron Constantin’s own recent success creating the very collectible Malte series, which debuted nearly a decade and a half ago, this newest edition adds yet another layer to that legacy.
Vacheron Constantin developed this new Caliber 2790 SQ caliber from the ground up specifically as a tonneau-shaped openworked caliber. It took more than 500 hours to conceptualize, model and design the new model. The engraving here focuses on geometric shapes, primarily triangles, which are combined and layered throughout the piece on bridges and plates. In a succession of tiny strokes of the burin that sometimes involves working to the nearest tenth of a millimeter, Vacheron Constantin’s artisans have created tiny triangles composed of recurrent straight lines to create three-dimensional effects. After this geometric mosaic is complete, the artists then hand-draw and chamfer all 246 parts of the caliber.
This platinum model features a sapphire dial and caseback; a slate-grey ring with metallic hour-markers rims its dial. The minute circle is painted while the date, power-reserve indicator and seconds indicator are engraved and inked. Like the 14-day model, the seconds hand is incorporated in the one-minute tourbillon, and the watch bears the Hallmark of Geneva.