Overview
Three great master painters
Jaeger-LeCoultre’s newly launched trio of watches, Reverso Tribute Enamel Hidden Treasures, celebrates the work of three great masters from the dawn of Modern Art: from the Realism of Courbet, to Van Gogh’s Post-Impressionism, to the expressive and experimental spirit of Klimt and the Viennese Secession, they have another fascinating story to tell. Each had been hidden from the world for many decades – assumed to have been lost for ever. The stories are remarkable and improbable – each with a plot-line worthy of a novel or a heist movie.
Paintings
Hidden treasures assumed to be lost forever
A double portrait stolen in a museum
Portrait of a Lady
Painted by Gustav Klimt a year before the end of his life, Portrait of a Lady is the only known ‘double’ portrait by the Viennese artist – a fact not discovered until 1996, when a sharp-eyed art student, Claudia Maga, discovered that Klimt had painted it over another portrait, which had apparently been ‘lost’ since 1912.
View of Lake Geneva
A leader of the 19th-century Realist movement and a political activist, Gustave Courbet fled his native France in 1873, settling La Tour-de-Peilz near Vevey on the northern shore of Switzerland’s Lake Léman (Lake Geneva), where he was inspired by the constantly changing views across the water to the Dents du Midi mountains.
Sunset at Montmajour
When Vincent Van Gogh moved to the South of France in 1888, it marked the beginning of a highly productive period of artistic maturity, as he experimented with new styles of visual expression in all genres – still-life, landscape and portraiture. Painted directly from life on a summer evening, Sunset at Montmajour is an example of the artist’s quest to portray nature in new ways – here, attempting to capture the distinctive vegetation of Provence and the rich colours of the ‘golden hour’ just before sunset.
Craftmanship
Exclusively at the Grande Maison
An exceptional artistic craft
Guilloche translucent enamel
This technique reveals the background of the dial, which is guilloche using a century-old machine which requires considerable expertise. The enamel craftsmen then affix a layer of colored enamel, which highlights the decorative work.
Each piece showcases it own guilloche and transluscent enamel colour : barleycorn & blue-green for the Klimt, herringbone & blue-grey for the Courbet and the traditional sunray guilloche with a deep green for the Van Gogh.
Miniature grand feu enamel
As complex as it is meticulous, this technique requires exceptional expertise. Using tiny brushes, the enameller’s skill as a draftsman must not only be equal to that of the original artist but must also be reduced to a tiny scale, approximately 2 cm2.
What’s more, the colour must be controlled so as to exactly match the original work of art – and yet, with the Grand Feu technique, the nature of enamel pigment means that the outcome after firing at over 800c cannot be exactly predicted. It is a question of the artisan’s judgement, based on many years of experience.
What's next
The story continues
