In some ways Dominique Baron seems much like the other artisans who practice the traditional craft of enameling in the French-Swiss Jura Mountains. Working from her home atelier in the town of Les Rousses just over the border in France, Baron is the master of a variety of techniques that she plies in the service of the internationally known Swiss watch brands who commission elaborate enamel dials. During the 18th and 19th centuries, such watches were important status symbols for aristocrats in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
 
Today, Baron and a handful of fellow craftspeople are the last of a once-flourishing profession that has dwindled due to changing tastes and its own failure to train young apprentices. But unlike her peers, many of whom are elderly and in the twilight of their careers, Baron is in her mid-30s and something of a revolutionary in enameling circles. In cooperation with some of her watchmaking clients she is changing time-honored techniques to make them more responsive to modern tastes and, she hopes, to enable them to survive for years to come.

All the traditional enamel techniques (among which are grand feu, cloisonné and miniature painting) share the same basic properties. Powdered glass tinged with metal oxides for color is applied to a surface—in this case a watch dial—and then fired in an oven until it emerges with an intense translucence. The process is repeated many times to give depth and form an image, but doing so carries risk. Any given firing may crack the piece and ruin it altogether.

Grand feu uses extremely high temperature to achieve colors of exceptional color and quality. The pictorial art of cloisonné, on the other hand, uses a thin gold wire to create cells in which different enamel colors are laid, creating a mosaic-like effect. The most exalted art of enamel is undoubtedly miniature painting, which shares many characteristics with both oil and watercolor painting. Color is applied with a brush, but it must be applied in a strict order and riskily fired many times during the process.

Miniature painting on watches evolved from miniature enamel portraiture during the 17th century, especially in France. One early master, Jean Petitot, became famous for adapting vivid English watercolor techniques to enamels, working on both sides of the Channel. The genre soon became a highly prestigious form of vanity art throughout the courts of Europe, but as many of the artisans were Protestants, a large contingent sought refuge in Geneva after the religious persecutions of Louis XIV. There, they turned their attention to watches, perfecting their skills on beautiful enameled timepieces decades before watchmakers were able to achieve consistent accuracy. Their work is the overlooked basis for Switzerland’s reputation as a center for luxury watchmaking.

Considering their place in history, it is not surprising that the old enamel techniques are held in such reverence in Switzerland, even as they have faded into commercial irrelevance. Today, miniature painting in the Geneva style, the most traditional and prestigious form of the craft, is practiced by a small handful of mostly aging artists who may spend weeks or months on a single dial. They hoard their pigments, many of which were made by companies that closed decades ago. Customers can wait years for watches from companies like Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin, which take commissions mostly for reproductions of well-known 19th-century Romanticist and realist paintings. The wait is so long because of the manpower shortage; few young artists get the chance to learn the techniques. Baron experienced this first-hand. "The masters are reluctant to share their skills," she says. "Sometimes they take apprentices but don’t show them everything."

Baron herself managed to become a master of miniature painting, but she had to learn circuitously, in the process working with some of the companies that had begun to break with the enamel tradition. After graduating from art school, she accepted a job at Jaeger-LeCoultre under enamelist Miklos Merczel, who established his own style in the 1980s. Merczel is best known for his Art Nouveau-style reproductions of the work of Alphonse Mucha, which are often placed on the case back of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso model. These pieces feature brilliant coloration and fine detail, but are not true Geneva enamel, as they receive only half as many firings as in the traditional technique.