Lady Arpels Jour Nuit Fée Ondine

Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie 2016

This year, Van Cleef & Arpels illustrates the inventiveness and fairylike quality of its watchmaking universe with two emblematic examples of the Maison’s savoir-faire: jewels that tell the time and Poetic Complications™ watches. Its High Jewelry expertise has given rise to creations that capture the hours in their most precious finery. Time confides itself like a secret or glitters #amboyantly, magni$ed by precious stones.

From diamonds to colored sapphires , gems al so punctuate the Poetic Complications collection. Taking pride of place this year with a particularly rich selection, the latter brings together the refinement of traditional crafts and technical sophistication to express the sources of Van Cleef & Arpels’ inspiration. In bringing to life a ballet of butterflies, a swallow or a graceful fairy, the Maison has deployed unbounded creativity to reinvent the Poetry of Time™, charged with enchantment and emotion.

Poetic Complications Collection

In 2006, Van Cleef & Arpels celebrated its centenary with an innovative watch, on which time flows by in harmony with the seasons. Bearing a new vision of watchmaking, the Poetic Complications collection was born. Each creation associates technical prowess, creative research and a sense of wonder. Time is measured over the course of a day, a night or a ballet of butterflies. Besides their technical mastery, these intricate mechanisms offer precious moments of emotion that form an integral part of Van Cleef & Arpels’ imagination.

Lady Arpels Jour Nuit Fée Ondine watch

The water nymph

The Lady Arpels™ Jour Nuit Fée Ondine watch combines the technical mastery of Poetic Complications creations with an extraordinary palette of craft skills.
The 24-hour movement – fitted with a module developed exclusively for Van Cleef & Arpels – animates an enchanting scene inspired by the High Jewelry clip Fée Ondine, created in 2005 (A Midsummer Night’s Dream collection).

This encounter has given rise to a dreamlike narrative: a nymph’s day unfolds before our eyes, to the rhythm of the movement of the sun and moon. Her graceful silhouette, recalling the Maison's feminine $gures created in the 1940s, is seated on a water lily, cooling herself in the crystal waters. Thanks to the dial’s rotating disk – which turns a full circle in 24 hours – the sun looks down on the scene from dawn to dusk, before dipping beneath the horizon to make way for a spellbinding full moon.

Spotlight on craft skills

Each element of the dial combines different skills to endow the ensemble with a rich palette of nuances and materials. The fairy Ondine, in gold and rose-cut diamond, contemplates a liquid landscape punctuated by water lilies of wonderfully re$ned detail. Champlevé enamel stands alongside delicate stone-setting: tsavorite garnets of intense green, pink sapphires and yellowy-orange spessartite garnets illuminate petals, pistils and even the leaf on which Ondine is sitting. To reinforce the color effect, grains of gold are adorned with miniature painting.

Its intensity varying from hour to hour, the water reveals its secrets thanks to plique-à-jour enamel. Produced using translucent enamel, this technique is used to create a remarkable play of transparency: the fairy’s leg – dipped in the cool water – remains visible, just like the heavenly orb that continues its course beneath the surface.
The sun in yellow sapphires and the diamond moon thus echo one another on either side of the horizon, within a sky of subtly painted mother-of-pearl or as a reflection in the mirrored waters. The scene continues on the back of the watch, where an engraved design prolongs the animated tableau – including on the oscillating weight.