“Condition is number one,” concurs Miami dealer Massimo Barracca. “A watch can go for four or

Audemars Piguet, platinum-cushion wristwatch, c. 1929, retailed by Cartier.

five times the price because of condition.” Collectors can be as fastidious as in any field, from paintings to postage stamps. “You may have two watches and the dial has been cleaned on one, and that can halve the value,” says Hines, noting that the originality of hands is also important, as are the sharpness of the case and the visibility of hallmarks. Collectors are slightly less fanatical about the perfect originality of the movement, expecting some repairs, but cautious about larger-scale restoration that could amount to chicanery.

“Forgery is a huge problem, even in Patek Philippe,” Tearle says. “It’s hurt the market but added value to watches that have proven provenance.” The Tank he sold for $111,500 is one good example of this. Another is the 1950s Patek Philippe, with moonphases and perpetual calendar, given to investment banking pioneer Dean Witter by his wife in the ’50s, which Sotheby’s sold in December for $374,400 against an estimate of $250,000 to $350,000. Of course, a celebrity name helps: New York dealer Edward Faber, who has sold watches associated with Mae West and Louis Armstrong, recalls bidding Jackie Kennedy’s run-of-the-mill $2,500 Piaget up to $10,000—and still missing the $24,000 sale price by a landslide. But the price of Witter’s watch, according to Rich, had less to do with the fame of the owner than with the fact that the luminous hands were transitional between two Patek models and had never been seen on another example.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the distinction between the rare and the rarest of the rare more than the two Patek Philippes that by extraordinary coincidence sold in Geneva one day apart from each other last November. Both of them were gold, cushion-shape split-seconds chronographs—a highly unusual complication in the ’20s—two of five examples known worldwide, and both were given almost exactly the same estimate. Sotheby’s did respectably with theirs, hitting the midrange with a winning bid of $736,959. Christie’s, though, sold its watch for $1,897,600. The reason? Simple enough: The winder on the Christie’s example was on the left side, a unique commission for a left-handed wearer, an eccentricity immediately apparent even to the non-collector.

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Jonathon Keats is the art critic for San Francisco Magazine and is a conceptual artist.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

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Antiquorum
New York
212.750.1103
www.antiquorum.com

Audemars Piguet
www.audemarspiguet.com

Blancpain
www.blancpain.ch

Breguet
001.41.2.18.41.90.90
www.breguet.ch

Cartier
800.227.8437
www.cartier.com

Corum
www.corum.ch

F.P. Journe
001.41.2.23.22.09.09
www.fpjourne.com

Franck Muller
212.463.8898
www.franckmuller.com

Jaeger-LeCoultre
www.jaeger-lecoultre.com

Panerai
www.panerai.com

Patek Philippe
212.218.1240
www.patek.com

Rolex
www.rolex.com

Vacheron Constantin
www.vacheron-constantin.com