REVERSO TRIBUTE ENAMEL MONET
To coincide with its participation in the Homo Faber Biennial exhibition in Venice this September, Jaeger-LeCoultre pays homage to the host city with three new limited-edition Reverso Tribute Enamel timepieces. The case-back of each piece features a miniature reproduction of one of Claude Monet’s paintings of Venice, reaffirming the Reverso as an ideal canvas for artistic expression.
Painted late in his career, Monet’s ‘Venice Series’ paintings exquisitely render the architecture and exceptional light of Venice that immediately captivated the artist when he and his wife arrived in La Serenissima in autumn 1908. At first declaring the city “too beautiful to paint”, Monet soon set to work, choosing a dozen different sites and painting them repeatedly at different times of day to capture the changing light. It was a prolific period: during his 10-week stay, Monet painted 37 images.
Homo Faber’s mission to honor and promote craft in all of its forms closely mirrors Jaeger-LeCoultre’s commitment to support not only the craft skills of watchmaking but also the artistic crafts associated with Haute Horlogerie. With the new Reverso Tribute Enamel ‘Venice Series’ timepieces, La Grande Maison showcases the talents and skills of the Manufacture’s in-house Métiers Rares™ (Rare Handcrafts) Atelier – bringing together the crafts of miniature painting, enamelling and guillochage -while paying tribute to the mission that it shares with Homo Faber.
The first of many challenges in decorating the case-back was to reproduce original works measuring more than 65 x 92 cm onto a surface of 25 x 20 mm. It was not only a feat of miniaturisation to perfectly mimic every detail of Monet’s paintings; the enameller also had to create an illusion of the impasto (the textured effect of thicker paint that the artist applied when he finished the canvases in his studio at Giverny) and recreate the dreamlike quality of the originals, with their fleeting effects of light and atmosphere. It required 14 layers of enamel to achieve the desired intensity and depth of color –three base layers, four layers of painting and seven layers of translucent ‘fondant’, with up to 15 separate firings at up to 800° Celsius.
The chosen motives were: “San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk”, “The Grand Canal Venice” and “The Doge’s Palace”. Offered in a limited edition of 10 pieces each, the Reverso Tribute Enamel ‘Venice Series’ is a fine tribute to the city that hosts the Homo Faber Biennial and a superb marriage of fine watchmaking with the decorative crafts of guillochage, enamelling and miniature painting.
