It has been described as the most famous watch in the world. Some say it is the most valuable.
And now, for the first time in decades, the pocket watch that Abraham-Louis Breguet made for Marie Antoinette has traveled from its home in Israel for public exhibition, in London.
A great deal of mystery surrounds the timepiece, which Breguet (the brand) calls No. 160. In 1783 Breguet (the man) was commissioned to create it, but today no one is sure who placed the order. Some assume it was Count Axel von Fersen, the Swedish nobleman who was among the queen’s most fervent admirers; the official history of the Breguet watch brand attributes it to one of the queen’s guards.
The order was simple, the brand has said: The watch had to be the most complicated and impressive timepiece ever made, and the budget was unlimited.
The 18-karat gold 63-millimeter watch is anything but simple. It features a transparent dial, which was very rare at the time, and has several complications, including a minute repeater, which chimes the hour, quarter-hour and minute with distinct tones; a perpetual calendar; an equation of time display, which indicates the difference between the local time and the time indicated by the sun; a thermometer; an automatic winding mechanism; and a 48-hour power reserve indicator.
“It is an absolute masterpiece,” Emmanuel Breguet, a direct descendant of Abraham-Louis and the brand’s heritage director, wrote in an email. “It sums up all the watchmaking expertise of Abraham-Louis Breguet. It has an incredible number of complications, and for a hundred years it remained the most complicated watch ever made.”
Many in the watch world still consider Breguet, who opened his atelier in Paris in 1775, to be the industry’s greatest watchmaker of all time. He created the first automatically winding pocket watch; the first tourbillon, which counters the effects of gravity on time keeping accuracy; the first shock-absorption system; the first chiming gongs; and a hairspring design that bears his name and remains in widespread use today.
Marie Antoinette never saw the finished watch; she was executed in 1793 during the French Revolution. It was completed by Breguet’s team in 1827, 44 years after the commission and four years after the founder’s own death.
Breguet’s company kept the watch until 1887, when it was sold. Eventually it and the rest of a large watch collection were donated to the L.A. Mayer Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem, which now has lent it for “Versailles: Science and Splendour,” an exhibition at the Science Museum in London through April 21. (The exhibition also includes other horological attractions such as the Clock of the Creation of the World, an astronomical timepiece designed by Claude-Siméon Passemant in 1754.)
The idea of bringing the watch to London had been many years in the making, said Sir Ian Blatchford, the director of the Science Museum.
But “it was only really in maybe the past two years that I began to think seriously that actually there was a nice link between our desire to borrow the Breguet and this exhibition,” Sir Ian said. “When we first talked to the museum in Jerusalem about borrowing the watch, their reaction was extremely cautious.”
It is not uncommon for the world’s most significant watches to be kept far from public view, either as part of private collections or held by watch brands themselves. In the case of the Marie Antoinette watch, “it was the policy of the board of directors not to loan it out,” said Gilad Levian, the chief executive of the Museum for Islamic Art since April 2021. “But we changed it.”
Although, he noted, “It took us about three years to get to this point.”
The board’s reticence was somewhat justified, considering that much of the museum’s watch collection, including the Marie Antoinette watch, was stolen in 1983 and negotiations for its recovery did not begin until 2006, noted Jenia Frumin, a senior guide at the museum who is known as something of an expert on the watch collection. “One needs to remember that after the fact that those pieces were missing for 23 years, the museum was kind of stressed out over the idea of trying to take them somewhere else.”
During the robbery, the thief disassembled a ventilation shaft to gain access to the display hall, which Mr. Frumin described as “just a simple hall with unreinforced glass cases and no cameras.” The haul included 106 watches and clocks, about half of them by Breguet.
An investigation by the Israeli police proved inconclusive. But in 2006, when the widow of a well-known Israeli thief named Na’aman Diller tried to sell four Breguet pocket watches, the mystery unraveled. Over the next two years, with Interpol’s leadership, most of the timepieces were recovered from safe deposit boxes and vaults in Israel, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States.
While the Breguet watches, including the Marie Antoinette, had not been harmed, “about half of what he stole — more than 40 pieces — were completely disassembled, down to the smallest mechanical detail,” Mr. Frumin said. “They were held in packages of old medicine, waffles, chocolates, cornflakes, every possible small box that there was, repackaged and documented by hand.” Documents described the thief’s plan to assemble some of them in different configurations and then sell them, although he was known to have successfully sold only two, using forged documents.
Even though the thief did not dismantle the Marie Antoinette, he did not maintain it, so some of its complications no longer work.
“We have a policy since I started at the museum,” Mr. Levian said, “that we’re not actually fixing or trying to fix the Breguet.”
Sir Ian voiced a similar opinion: “I was reluctant to go down that route because what mattered to me most was having the watch, but you could say it’s a piece of unfinished business.
“When we looked at it — with a little help from Emmanuel — we thought that the restoration project would take at least two years. It is slightly irresistible, isn’t it, to see and hear it ticking again? But that’s a prize for someone else rather than me, I think.”
Besides, just getting the Marie Antoinette to London proved to be difficult.
Even after the art museum’s board agreed to the loan, Mr. Levian had what he described as “one big problem.”
“Israel is at war,” he said, “and when you are at war, you can’t have insurance against war and terror. So we had an emergency meeting, and decided that the watch will go without it. We couriered it on a flight to London and took all measures possible to keep it safe.”
The Science Museum had a big problem, too. While a government-supported indemnity program covers all great treasures on loan for display in Britain, “you have to work out a valuation,” Sir Ian said. “Trying to agree a valuation for the Breguet 160 is much more difficult than for an old master painting, where the market prices are pretty obvious.”
In promoting the exhibition before its opening on Dec. 12, Sir Ian said, he was reluctant to put the spotlight on the watch’s financial value, preferring to highlight its historical significance. But previous estimates have ranged from $30 million to $100 million. “If it went to auction, which it never will,” he said, “there’s almost no limit to what it would be worth. One starts breaking out in a sweat just thinking about it.” Eventually, a figure was agreed upon, but one that he declined to disclose.
Once the London exhibition ends, the watch is to be returned to Jerusalem. But now that it has been lent, Sir Ian says he is optimistic that it will soon be on the road again, as the Science Museum has been in talks about sending the whole exhibition to other museums.
“Prior to the recent war in Israel and Gaza,” he said, “our minds were focused on the cultural issues and opportunities that would flow from the Abraham Accords between Israel and certain Gulf states. Some of us hope that actually that might still be achievable.”
The possibility of further exhibition is something Mr. Levian also would welcome.
“We already had some negotiations before Covid with Japan,” he said. “It’s wonderful to have some artifact that a hundred thousand people will come to your museum to see, but it’s not about ego.
“It’s been here in Israel for the last 20 years. We have had our time. Now it’s time for it to travel and to be everywhere else in the world.”
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