Marking the centenary of Ferdinand Hodler’s death in 1918 — one of Switzerland’s most significant 19th-century painters, known for a style he called “parallelism,” a symbolist take on landscape built around repetition and symmetry — Jaeger-LeCoultre reproduced three of his Swiss lake paintings in enamel across a purpose-built white gold case. Each dial is finished with a fine hand-guilloché and engraved basket-weave pattern under translucent enamel, its colour chosen to echo the mood of the landscape on the case-back; each miniature took an enameller more than fifty hours to complete, reproducing a canvas many times the size of the finished 3 cm² case-back. Eight pieces of each subject, twenty-four watches in total, sold exclusively through Jaeger-LeCoultre boutiques.
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The Alps reflected in still water at first light — a mirror effect Hodler returned to often — rendered under a light sky-blue translucent enamel chosen to match the softness of the blue and white shades in the original.
A pine-green enamel dial, chosen after the rocks at the base of the original painting suggested the right shade — the water’s transparency lets the lakebed show through, a detail the enameller had to carry over from canvas to case-back.
Painted between Thun and Interlaken, this is generally reckoned the most sought-after of the three subjects. A calm blue enamel dial mirrors the sky reflected across Hodler’s lake.