Museum gift shops — both on-site and online — now have a lot more than van Gogh sunflower tote bags and silk scarves with Picasso prints. Many offer a range of quality timepieces, some of which came about through collaborations with established watchmakers and artists.
Last year, for example, the Prado Museum in Madrid worked with the Swiss watchmaker Cauny and the Pritzker-winning architect Rafael Moneo to create a wristwatch resembling the square clocks that Mr. Moneo had designed in the 1970s and ’80s for the Spanish city of Logroño and the Atocha railroad station in Madrid.
The result was the Moneo Prado, a 30-millimeter quartz design in steel, with a Horween leather strap, which sells for 195 euros ($205) at the museum, on its website and on the Cauny website. At the museum’s suggestion, the watch’s hands are the same shade of red that decorates its own Hall of Muses, which Mr. Moneo redesigned in 2007.
The watch belongs to Cauny’s Architects of Time Series, begun in 2022. As Filipe Costa Almeida, the brand’s chief executive, wrote in an email: “We wanted to challenge master craftsmen who have spent their lives thinking about time and space, to design a watch, asking them to translate meters into millimeters, and in doing so, to create a functional piece of everyday beauty.”
According to Constanza Ontiveros of Mexico City, who has written widely about the museum retail sector, watches such as the Moneo Prado belong to an increasingly upmarket selection of accessories in museum gift shops. Typically, she wrote in an email, such items include “reproductions of historic or iconic designs, pieces in collaboration with brands inspired by the museum’s collection, and artistic designs.”
A quick internet search turns up a diverse selection, including a €120 quartz watch that is a scale copy of the clock depicted in van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters,” a collaboration between the Dutch-born designer Tord Boontje and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. And there are luxury mechanical timepieces by Vacheron Constantin, which last year announced a new watchmaking collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the expansion of one with the Louvre in Paris.
At the British Museum Shop in London, a gold-plated pocket watch with a 50-millimeter dial from the Jean Pierre of Switzerland brand is a double hunter, a watch with lids on both sides of its case. At 399 pounds ($502), the watch is powered by both quartz and Swiss 17-jewel mechanical movements.
The Museum of Modern Art Design Store in New York carries Swatch quartz timepieces featuring the works of the American artists Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat, in various sizes and starting at about $100. Among its best sellers in watches, according to its website, are the Modello Uno Diving Watch by the Italian brand Unimatic, for $550, and the Modul Quartz Watch by Paulin, a brand founded in 2013 in Scotland by three sisters, for $575.
The watches point to “a growing intersection of art, design and accessories,” Ms. Ontiveros wrote, and demonstrate “the increasing appeal of a specialized retail sector that also is instrumental to the sustainability of nonprofit cultural organizations across the globe and, when visited in person, is now attached to the museum experience.”
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