Yahoo Finance A way with the fairies: the magical Van Cleef & Arpels Automate Fee Ondine clock
Van Cleef & Arpels is the most extraordinary of luxury maisons. Part of the Richemont group, it consistently demonstrates a resolutely uncorporate independence of thought and style. Commercially successful – a 2016 report by Vontobel Bank estimated it is second only to Cartier in earnings within the group – it somehow manages never to look overly commercial. Moreover, as a historically pure jewellery house, it produces some of the most creative horology around.
Take, for example, Van Cleef & Arpels’ latest “Poetic Complications” – the term the company uses for its most complex horological flights of fancy – in this case involving a wristwatch and a breathtaking table clock.
As it turns out, the two creations are linked by themes: flapping wings (and more) animated by mechanical means. Although, according to Nicolas Bos, Van Cleef & Arpels urbane CEO, it’s an accident of timing as each project had entirely different development paths.
The maison’s Lady Arpels Papillon Automate (French for automaton) wristwatch hides its horological dexterity beneath a perfectly innocent-looking display of gem-setting and métiers d’art techniques. A sculptural butterfly on the dial, part of a composition that includes enamel fronds floating over the watch face, suddenly starts to flap its wings. This occurs at seemingly random intervals, resulting from a system that combines how much the watch is being wound by its rotor with an irregular, 13-sector wheel that turns once an hour. Notably, this was conceived and produced entirely in-house – save for the occasional machining elsewhere within the Richemont Group.
For its imagination and ingenuity, the Papillon Automate is quite the horological bombshell. And yet it’s entirely put in the shade by the Automate Fée Ondine. Nominally a table clock with a mechanism that animates a fairy and the lily pad on which it sits, it’s so much more in conception, execution and effect. You need to see it in action to appreciate what a unique creation it is.
As Van Cleef tells it, the rippling movement of the lily pad leaves awakens the sleeping fairy, who sits up, watches a lily flower open and a butterfly dance before returning to sleep again. The charm and the wonder is that the myriad linked movements look so completely and believably natural and yet took a feat of micro-engineering to achieve.
Whereas the watch was an in-house creation, the Fée Ondine project brings together an extraordinary set of craft masters. Every detail has had deep craft invested into its creation, from the box to the enamel petals and even the unique cut of the stone that forms the fairy’s face. Finding exactly the right colours and transitions for the lily pad leaves and the flower petals took a painstaking number of attempts before the creative team were satisfied. At the heart of the project was the automaton specialist François Junod.
A visit to his atelier in Sainte-Croix in the Jura reveals both the sheer volume of work that Junod puts into perfecting the various mechanism that animate everything, as well as the material culture that he inhabits. The atelier is packed full of seemingly random objects, from racks of cine cameras to shelves bulging with mannequin limbs, vintage mechanical jukeboxes and fruit machines in various states of assembly. But as soon as I start talking to Junod it becomes clear that everything is here for a purpose.
The Bolex cine cameras, for instance, were made in Sainte-Croix and use control mechanisms that he’s translated into his automata, while the fruit machines incorporate elaborate random-result mechanisms that are destined for another project. But it’s the experience that Junod has had working on the restoration of 18th-century automata which taught him how to create such natural movement. Seeing the Fée Ondine perform its magic in his atelier, with all its Geppetto’s-workshop atmosphere, seemed entirely appropriate.
Yet this remains a Van Cleef & Arpels project through and through. Fifteen different craft masters brought together to create a wonder. This is just the latest and most extraordinary of Van Cleef & Arpels visionary “Poetic Complications”.
