Charity auctions tend to bring out either a brand’s generosity or its imagination; rarely both. Jaquet Droz’s contribution to this December’s TimeForArt auction manages the double. The Petite Heure Minute “Les Volumes du Temps” is a unique piece whose dial was designed not by a celebrated master but by Fiona Djukanovic, a student at the Académie de Meuron in Neuchâtel — which is precisely the point, since TimeForArt exists to fund young artists through the Swiss Institute.
The dial is a small manifesto of Swiss craft: an X-shaped composition in shades of blue, champlevé and flinqué enamel laid over hand engraving, two raised triangular plates with hand-engraved sunray motifs, and forty tiny parallelepiped blocks tiling the surface. There are no hands — hours and minutes drag past two apertures on sunray-finished discs, a display borrowed from last year’s Ophidian Hour and powered by the automatic calibre JD2653.SI, with 68 hours of reserve, in a 41-millimetre white gold case.
The watch crosses the block on 5 December at Phillips’ New York Watch Auction XV, one of 26 unique pieces donated by as many brands for TimeForArt’s third edition, with an estimate of CHF 100,000–150,000 — though charity estimates, as the Gulf’s auction rooms know well, are made to be broken. For a maison founded on automata and wonder, handing the pencil to a student may be the most Jaquet Droz gesture of all: the eighteenth century’s great showman betting on the twenty-first’s newcomers.
