Lot 318

LeRoy

A rare "Montre à Tact"

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The revolving back lid with applied pink gold arrow pointer indicating the hours. Caseband with pink gold touch studs.

Breguet was the first maker to come up with the design for this kind of watch - he sold the first one early in 1799 to Madame Betancourt, the wife of his best friend. He continued producing the watches in different variations, some with quite large touch pieces (like this watch) and some with small ones. The price for these watches that Breguet created for the wealthiest of his customers was between 10,000 and 15,000 francs. This was a truly enormous sum of money in the early 19th century, nevertheless the watches were highly sought after at the time. One of the reasons for their popularity was that at the time it was considered quite unseemly to read the time in public; these expensive pieces made it possible to tell the time without taking the watch out of one’s pocket. Breguet remained almost the only one to create this kind of watch; only Le Roy Horloger de S.A.I et R. Madame à Paris (Bazile-Charles Le Roy (1765-1839)) and very few others followed in his footsteps. Le Roy created a number of timepieces of this type - the most elaborate one for the Prince of Hesse, which had 17k diamond buttons for reading the time in the dark and is now owned by the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva. The watch was made around 1810; it bears the number 3191 and is decorated with engine-turned pattern and enamel.
Bazile-Charles Le Roy (1765-1839) was an ingenious watchmaker who created high quality pocket watches and naval chronometers. He was among the first in France to ever use the lever escapement in his watches. He created some watches in the style of Lepine early in his career, but soon drew his inspiration from Breguet and his bridge calibers.
In 1805 Bazile-Charles Le Roy was appointed "maker to Madame Mère de l'Empereur". In a close relationship with Napoleon and his family, Bazile-Charles produced clocks and watches of supreme quality; among them were traditional clocks as well as decimal clocks, Montres à tact or timepieces with sonnerie.
At the time when the French Revolution ended, the house Le Roy was known as one of the leading makers of pendulum and travel clocks in Paris; the majority of the clocks was produced for the officers of Napoleon’s campaigns. Bazile-Charles Le Roy was soon appointed "maker to the imperial court" of Napoleon I, who had just been crowned in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris; also, of course "maker to Madame Mère de l'Empereur" (Napoleon’s mother), "maker to the King of Westphalia" (Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother), and even "maker to Princess Pauline" (Napoleon’s sister).