Chopin
The composer's face, painted by hand, with piano keyboards in mother-of-pearl and stone.
- Level
- Super Premium
- Diameter
- 47 mm
- Calibre
- ETA 2824-2Swiss automatic calibre
- Dial
- Hand painting, mother-of-pearl, natural stone
- Case
- Sapphire crystal
- Strap
- Ostrich leather, handmade
- Price
- Set individually, in direct conversation with the watch designer.
The workshop takes on a small number of commissions each year.
The story on the dial
Chopin did not have one single piano. He played on Pleyel instruments and on others built by the Viennese piano builder Conrad Graf, who had also worked for Beethoven and Schubert, while Camille Pleyel, the son of the firm's founder, was a close friend.
The detail matters for a dial. The piano of the first half of the nineteenth century is not the piano of today: different mechanics, different sound, different keys. A portrait that sets the composer beside a modern instrument gets the period wrong without appearing to get anything wrong.
The keyboards on the dial are mother-of-pearl and natural stone. The white and the black are not painted: they are two different materials, cut and set, which behave differently in light. At forty-seven millimetres, the largest diameter with a stated measurement in the public portfolio, the difference between them is visible.
Sources for this text: Britannica, the Pleyel firm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, piano builders of the period.
