709,000 ITL
"The Heart" of Piguet & Meylan A Highly Important Gold,Enamel,Pearl and Turquoise-set Heart-shaped Quarter-repeating Musical Automaton Watch, made for the Chinese Market by Piguet & Meylan, Geneve, circa 1820. White enamel,with Roman numerals, outer minute and seconds ring. Blued-steel lozenge hands with counter-poised centreseconds. GiIt brass, Lepine caliber, with goingbarrel, cylinder escapement with plain three-arm balance and blued-steel flat spring. Disk musical musical train with 20 inclividual teeth, playing on the hour or at-will, with Music/Silent switch in the edge. Repeating on two gong by depressing the pendant. In perfect condition condition. H. 95 W. 65 Notes Such watches were usually sold by pair and used to be presented to Oriental Kings and Emperors. The fabulous heart-shaped watches by Piguet & Meylan are to be counted amongst the small group of Swiss automaton and musical objects that may be considered as the most extraordinary and fantastic ever produced; the singing-bird pistols and gold cages are other examples in the sanie genre. Perhaps no more than four other examples are known to exist. One, formerly in the collection of B. Franck, Paris and illustrated in Chapuis, Le Monde des Automates, Vol. II, p. 45, fig. 325, was subsequently in the collection of King Farouk of Egypt, and sold in the Palace Collections Sale in 1954 as lot 462 (Sotheby's Catalogue). Another was in the collection of Gustave Loup, Geneva, and a
Auctioneer:
Antiquorum
Date:
1992-01-18
