For the Reverso’s 90th anniversary, the Métiers Rares atelier reproduced three paintings chosen not only for their beauty but for their provenance: each had vanished for decades and was assumed lost forever. The artists were picked because all three were active in the era that produced the Reverso itself — spanning 19th-century Realism, Post-Impressionism, and the Viennese Secession. Jaeger-LeCoultre approached the museums now holding the works to agree the interpretations and colours.
Sources: Jaeger-LeCoultre · Hodinkee — the enameller · Quill & Pad · Revolution · Watchonista
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The only known “double” portrait by Klimt, painted over an earlier one — a fact undiscovered until 1996, when art student Claudia Maga spotted that the underlying portrait had been missing since 1912. Klimt had reportedly fallen in love with a young woman who then died suddenly; he painted over her portrait to ease the loss. In the late 1990s the work was stolen days before an exhibition in Italy, and found shortly afterwards by a gardener — stuffed into a crevice in a stone wall under ivy, inside a waterproof bag, in perfect condition. On the watch, a barleycorn guilloché dial in green Grand Feu enamel echoes the painting’s background.
Painted near Arles in 1888 and long dismissed as not being by Van Gogh at all — it spent years in an attic after being declared a fake. It was finally authenticated in 2013, one of very few full-size Van Gogh canvases confirmed in modern times. The dial’s sunray guilloché in Grand Feu enamel plays against the case-back’s reproduction of the artist’s heavy impasto brushwork.
Painted in the last years of Courbet’s life, in exile in Switzerland on the shore of Lake Geneva — within sight of the valley where the Reverso would be made half a century later. A herringbone guilloché dial in misty grey-blue Grand Feu enamel picks up the painting’s soft, atmospheric palette.