The Comeback
The rarer the object, the bigger the desire to possess it. Immediately after the American Watchmakers Institute’s private sell-off of the Packard watches, both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, along with the smaller Antiquorum, led a streak of blockbuster mechanical watch sales of Patek Philippes, Vacheron Constantins, Rolexes, Audemars Piguets, Cartiers, and Jaeger LeCoultres.
As interest in vintage wristwatches mounted, the Italian collector and expert Jader Barracca cowrote the seminal Le Temps de Cartier. Martin Huber and Alan Banbery’s books on Patek Philippe pocket and wristwatches became bibles for collectors. For the first time, enthusiasts had precise information on models, including the exact quantities manufactured. These books became an index with which to navigate the inscrutable labyrinth of more than a century’s worth of exclusive and rare timepieces and a concrete way to determine their value.
Men dusted off their grandfathers’ old watches and widows scavenged through their garages, reaching behind old bureaus and into safety deposit boxes for long-forgotten timepieces. Thanks to the popularity of mass-market vibrating quartz timepieces, the 1970s and 1980s had severely depleted mechanical watch inventories. By the 1990s the appearance at auction of a Patek Philippe chronometer or a Rolex Daytona not only sent prices soaring in the rarities market; it catapulted the contemporary market. In 1994 Blancpain, founded in the eighteenth century—a name barely on life support toward the end of the twentieth—announced that it had sold nine of its “1735” models, including an $800,000 grande complication equipped with a perpetual calendar, split-second chronograph, minute repeater, and tourbillon. Such staggering numbers enticed a great deal of press coverage, drawing new collectors into the heat.
Perhaps the only thing that attracted more interest than price records was a particularly rare object with spectacular provenance. In this narrowest of universes, the watches once owned by Henry Graves, Jr., and James Ward Packard became some of the most coveted. Over the years, scarcely more than a handful—not including the AWI sales—had turned up in privately brokered deals. During the sixty-year sweep since Packard’s death, fewer than ten of the gentlemen’s watches had come to light at auction. After five of Graves’s pocket watches sold in 1989 as part of “The Art of Patek Philippe” jubilee sale, and the Packard in 1990 at Sotheby’s, a sixth watch turned up eight years later, on October 31, 1998, during the first day of Antiquorum’s two-day sale, “Important Watches, Wristwatches and Clocks in Geneva.” It was Graves’s prizewinning, eighteen-carat gold pocket lever chronometer with thirty-six hours power reserve indication. The Patek Philippe (no. 178448), completed in 1926 for the financier, fetched 46,200 Swiss francs ($34,709). This piece is now on exhibit at the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva.
Watch collectors were a competitive lot, and the contest between the top-tier players soon became heated. Among them, Patek Philippe was the most formidable, with Alan Banbery shattering a number of records both at auction and privately. The astronishing $1,715,000 that Patek Philippe paid in 1996 for the one-of-a-kind Calatrava with an astronomic minute repeater, perpetual calendar, and moon-phase indication, the classic round wristwatch named for the watchmaker’s symbol, made in 1939, not only raised the bar and made headlines, it earned an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest price ever paid at auction for a wristwatch. Two years later, Banbery paid $950,000 for yet another record breaker, a 1953 eighteen-carat pink-gold World Time wristwatch with double crowns and a cloisonné enamel dial representing a map of North America, its outer dial ringed with forty-one major cities.
As the market took off and the stampede broadened, those watches commissioned for Graves and Packard became something of a Holy Grail. With so few of their timepieces in circulation and so much damage done by the quartz crisis, outside of a small group of collectors, their appearance quickly became a race against time. As Aurel Bacs of Christie’s put it, “These watches rarely come on the market. One day they will no longer be available. They will be put away in bulletproof cases. And then it’s finito. Even if you have all the money in the world, it is the highest level of agony and pain for a collector who has the money and it is not for sale. It is a knife in a collector’s heart.”
• • •
At the start of 1999, Sotheby’s promoted its two-day February sale of “Important Watches, Wristwatches and Clocks,” bringing together more than five hundred timepieces, including two of Graves’s Patek Philippe wristwatches that had been consigned to the house. The first of the two was the watchmaker’s first perpetual calendar chronograph, reference no. 1518, crafted in 1947. The watch, including the buyer’s premium, fetched $96,000, comfortably above its high-end estimate of $80,000. The second was his pink gold rectangular wristwatch, reference no. 2425, also produced in 1947, with a subsidiary seconds dial. It brought in only $7,475, just below the low-end estimate of $8,000.
The entire sale realized $5,082,386, the highest total in a decade for wristwatches at Sotheby’s. At the time, Graves’s collection had yet to become known outside an elite circle of the most knowledgeable bidders. Yet a rival watch expert snickered, thinking the auction total had fallen short. “Sotheby’s missed the train,” he said.
Within weeks, that changed as another opportunity presented itself. And Sotheby’s did not blink.
• • •
Approaching his ninth decade, Seth Atwood surprised the watch world just as he had when he began collecting, and with little discussion, put the gears in motion to shut down his Time Museum and with it, his longtime horological passion. On March 12, 1999, when the Museum in Rockford, Illinois, closed its doors for good, Sotheby’s watch department was already negotiating a deal with Seth Atwood to auction off its best pieces. Although he kept the reasons for this turn of events to himself (many believed he did not want to burden his family with maintaining the museum), it was Atwood’s great desire to keep the more than three thousand instruments together as a collection. Daryn Schnipper pushed hard to secure the commission, though she had her eyes on the biggest prize of all: the Graves Supercomplication.
When Atwood struck upon the shocking decision to sell his collection, assessed at $33 million, the city of Rockford stepped up to buy it. Michael Lash, the director of Chicago’s public art program who had grown up in Rockford, wanted Atwood’s timepieces to remain in Illinois, but the nostalgia bid never got off the ground, as his hometown lacked the necessary money. Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago and Governor George Ryan of Illinois also made something of a crusade of retaining Atwood’s collection in a national time museum.
The great Chicago collector Justice Warren Shepro had also lobbied hard to keep Atwood’s legacy in Chicago. “There has never been another collection as comprehensive as his,” he exclaimed, “nor one comprising individual pieces of such caliber and importance.” Atwood and Shepro had become great friends, and in fact Shepro moved from Chicago to Roscoe, Illinois, simply to be closer to Atwood’s Time Museum.
In May Atwood held a silent auction. The city of Chicago came up with only $25 million, well below several other bids that exceeded $40 million. Yet in the end, Atwood awarded his watches to that city because it was the only bidder to agree to keep the majority intact. Several successive deals were struck to shore up the considerable difference. Chicago’s Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum privately raised funds to buy nine of the museum’s most important astronomical instruments. Atwood agreed to display 1,550 of his clocks and watches at the private Museum of Science and Industry while the city raised the funds to pay for them and to cull eighty-one pieces and sell those at auction to make up the difference between the city’s low bid and the higher ones that he had turned down. In the end, however, Chicago’s deal fell apart. The entire Time Museum would eventually be split up into four sales and sold at Sotheby’s in New York. The last of the sales, held over three days in October 2004, would bring $18,210,690.
Of all of the magnificent timepieces that had come into Atwood’s possession over the years, he insisted upon retaining just one: a gold, one-minute tourbillon pocket watch with a coaxial escapement that also incorporated a perpetual calendar, equation of time, phases of the moon, thermometer, and a power reserve indicator. Atwood had commissioned the piece from George Daniels.
Six years later, after the final sale on February 21, 2010, Atwood died. He was ninety-two.
• • •
With the Graves Supercomplication, which Daryn Schnipper had taken to calling “the Big Kahuna,” within its grasp, Sotheby’s received an astonishing phone call from a woman claiming to be a close friend of Marilyn Preston Graves. The daughter of Duncan Graves, Marilyn had died on July 3, 1998, and the caller, representing her estate, explained that she had stumbled upon a cache of remarkable pocket watches and sought an appraisal. While going through Marilyn’s Fairfield, Connecticut, home, she had discovered a shoebox stuffed under a bed with four pocket watches. Perhaps they were valuable?
There were three Patek Philippe tourbillon minute repeaters, two encased in gold and the third in platinum. The fourth, also platinum, was by the watchmaker Jules Jürgensen. All four were engraved with a coat of arms, an eagle issuing out of a coronet, and a banner with the Latin motto Esse Quam Videri. During the past forty years, little more than a handful of Graves watches had surfaced. Now not one but four, it seemed, had suddenly reappeared.
Distant relations and interested parties often streamed through Sotheby’s glass doors seeking confirmation for objects after happening upon long-lost gems. It was the desire of every auction house to come across some hidden treasure that would break records, splashing across international headlines, raising the bar on prices for years to come. The odds, however, rarely tended to favor the scavengers. Stunned, Schnipper turned over in her mind the likelihood of stumbling upon unknown Graves timepieces while Sotheby’s was in the midst of commissioning his masterpiece.
She dropped everything and traveled to Connecticut.
• • •
Marilyn was the last of Duncan Graves’s surviving children. He had died in 1977 and his wife, Helen, in 1962. Marilyn’s twin sister, Helen Mitchell Graves, had died in 1968 at thirty-six, and her disinherited brother, Duncan, Jr., in 1970 at forty-three. Duncan and Helen’s children were said to have been stricken with a congenital disease, and as a result none had married or had children of their own. At sixty-six, Marilyn had lived the longest of her siblings. At the deaths of Harry Graves 3rd and George Coe Graves II, Henry’s family tree had been sheared.
A society beauty with a taste for nightlife, Marilyn had devoted much of her time to volunteer work at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Junior League of New York and remained active in the Colonial Dames in the State of New York. After Duncan took up full-time residency at his two hundred–acre Connecticut estate, Breeze Hollow Farm, she divided her time between Fairfield and her father’s Park Avenue duplex, bought in 1953, the year Henry Graves, Jr., died. As her father’s sole heir, Marilyn Preston Graves inherited her father’s entire estate, along with several of her grandfather’s watches.
While the important players in the watch world had come to know the name Reginald H. “Pete” Fullerton, Jr., and his association with his grandfather, the name Marilyn Preston Graves scarcely registered. But as Schnipper discovered, the watches were unmistakably Henry Graves, Jr.’s: complicated, interesting, and beautiful. They also happened to be some of the most important pieces that the American financier had commissioned.14
All of the timepieces were made especially for Henry. At least two had arrived during the 1920s, at the height of Henry’s and Ward’s pursuit of complicated timepieces. One gold watch, no. 198052, was the piece equipped with eleven complications; another, no. 174961, had twelve complications. The latter was the glorious pocket watch that Henry had commissioned in 1919 and received just days before his daughter’s wedding in 1926; it was also one of the pieces that signaled his return to the game. The third, received in 1948, was a rare platinum, Observatory prizewinning, open-face one-minute tourbillon, no. 198427. It was one of three platinum Patek Philippe tourbillons known to exist, all of which were made exclusively for Graves. The fourth watch, the Jules Jürgensen pocket chronometer, no. 15954, acquired in 1940 after his four-year collecting break, did not match the Patek Philippes in caliber, but it had earned the first-class certificate at the Neuchâtel Observatory.
The watches went on sale on June 15, 1999, at Sotheby’s in New York. Although it had been just four months since the house sold the pair of Graves wristwatches, word moved through the fickle watch world that previously unknown grandes complications from the important twentieth-century American Patek Philippe patron had surfaced with impeccable provenance, technical daring, and overall rarity.
At the auction, Patek Philippe made quick work of the first of the two gold pocket watches, acquiring the piece with eleven complications for the museum for $794,500. But their elation was brief; the second gold watch, featuring twelve complications, went to an anonymous bidder for $640,500. The rare platinum tourbillon realized $453,500; it too slipped the watchmaker’s grasp, going to an anonymous collector. The Jules Jürgensen fetched only $24,150. Together, the three Graves Patek Philippes tallied up nearly $2 million, breaking the American auction record for mechanical watches. Six months later, Sotheby’s broke all world records, selling the Supercomplication for more than $11 million. By the time the hammer dropped, the Graves name was electric.
Once the auction room applause died down, interest in acquiring a watch commissioned by Henry Graves, Jr., exploded, and with it renewed attention was given to the collection of James Ward Packard, touching off a new chase.
Although the appearance on the market of pieces owned by the two great horological patrons of the twentieth century was now widely anticipated, they remained extremely rare. And it was largely those previously sold watches that recirculated on the market. When, on May 18, 2004, the Graves platinum tourbillon (no. 198427), first sold in 1999 at Sotheby’s as part of Marilyn Preston Graves’s consignment to a private collector, went under the hammer once again, this time through Christie’s in a Geneva sale, it fetched $1,763,780, more than double the pre-sale estimates and nearly a 300 percent gain over its sale five years earlier. This time the Patek Philippe Museum held the winning bid. A month later, when the Packard dual-time pocket watch (no. 190757) appeared at Christie’s, fourteen years after it first sold at Sotheby’s, Patek Philippe swooped down and bid $59,750, winning the gold and silver timepiece, paying more than three times what it had first earned under the hammer. Two years earlier, the watchmaker scored another victory when it toppled the bid for Graves’s exceptional silver desk clock at an Antiquorum auction in Geneva for 1,103,500 Swiss francs ($729,297). Alan Banbery would deliver yet another coup de grâce, obtaining the clock’s near identical twin, first made for James Ward Packard in 1923, in a private transaction.
The journey of Packard’s Paperweight to the Patek Philippe Museum had a bit of kismet. Before she died in 1960, Elizabeth Packard had asked her niece Katherine to donate the desk clock to a museum. But her nephew Dick Gillmer had long had his eye on the spectacular silver and gold embellished clock and told the estate’s executor that he wanted it. Outside of her diary, where Elizabeth expressed her abject disappointment with Gillmer, she made it clear that she intended to cut her nephew out of her will. Unfortunately, there were no legal instructions, and a small tiff broke out, with Katherine refusing to relinquish the clock. One of Mrs. Packard’s executors stepped in with a solution. He suggested the two flip a coin for it. When Katherine refused, the executor sold it to Dick for $250, perhaps a tenth of what Ward had paid for it in 1923.
Both the Graves and Packard Paperweights now sit in the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva.
• • •
On November 14, 2005, buoyed by the manic prices going for Graves pieces, the private collector who had first acquired the gold Graves pocket watch with twelve complications (no. 174961) consigned Christie’s to sell it. Again the Patek Philippe Museum won the sale, paying $1,980,200, nearly triple what it fetched six years earlier. “An absolutely new chapter in the market price for watches and the Graves name had opened,” declared Aurel Bacs.
A year earlier, during Christie’s spring watch sale on May 18, the Jules Jürgensen sold in 1999 had also resurfaced. A private European collector snapped it up for 167,300 Swiss francs ($130,724). Perhaps the least technically important of the cache found hiding under Marilyn Preston Graves’s bed had jumped 481 percent from its prior sale.
Others were stirred to test the market. After sitting undisturbed in a bank vault for twenty years, Graves’s platinum tourbillon (no. 198311), which was sold to a private collector at “The Art of Patek Philippe” sale in 1989, was back on the market at Christie’s fall watch sale held on November 17, 2008, in Geneva. It hit the market just as the global economy began its descent into the slough, yet it still fetched $821,910, a more than 200 percent increase over its first sale.
Patek Philippe’s aggressive pursuit soon delivered the greatest number of Graves watches and, outside of the anonymous collector who snapped up the majority of the American Watch Institute’s Packard pieces, perhaps the largest number of the automaker’s watches as well.
Spread over four floors and spanning five centuries, the Patek Philippe Museum featured the Graves and Packard pieces on the first floor, surrounded by more than one thousand watches. The Sterns’ collection of antique pieces dating back to the sixteenth century occupied the second floor.
Each of the Graves and Packard collections sat inside of its own custom-made eucalyptus and glass case, presented to its best and most glittering advantage, just steps apart from the other. The showstopper, the Packard, shimmered under the soft lights with its five hundred stars rotating in the celestial chart directly across from the Graves pieces. Underscoring the heft of these two collectors in historical context, Philippe Stern’s concession from the anonymous bidder, the mysterious figure who changed the market with the single bob of a paddle, was that arrangements were made to temporarily loan the Supercomplication to the museum. There collectors, tourists, and hobbyists could see for themselves the spoils of a most uncommon victory under bulletproof glass, just a few feet away from the watches of the man who started it all with the first tick. “Hence at the beginning of the 20th century, for Patek Philippe the supremely complicated watch was put at stake in a fascinating duel between two gentlemen,” reads the accompanying plaque. “These two masterpieces are even today among the most complicated watches ever to have been made.”
Yet the trail of the Packard pieces that had elevated the Graves collection had grown cold through the years. Every so often one would pop up, usually in serendipitous fashion. In 2003 a gold Wittnauer pocket watch owned by Packard went up on eBay. The seller, a septuagenarian dairy farmer living in a trailer in Chautauqua, New York, where Ward had maintained his summer home, claimed that he scoured local flea markets for antiques and collectibles and then sold them on the online auction in order to help pay for his health insurance. Under a seller’s handle he advertised a “Repeater Gold Watch John [sic] Packard Auto Giant.” The cuvette of the eighteen-carat gold Wittnauer pocket watch was engraved James Ward Packard, November 5, 1916, Warren Ohio. The back case featured the automaker’s monogram in stylized blue enamel, with the P chipped. The repeater setting was broken and it needed a cleaning. It sold for $1,576.51.
Four years later the retired dairy farmer turned up Packard’s eighteen-carat gold Patek Philippe wristwatch with iridium hands and engine-turned cushion case. The owner described the watch as “one of a kind.” Again he put it up for sale on eBay, where he incorrectly stated that most of the auto tycoon’s collection remained on exhibit in the Smithsonian. Among the six bidders, the winner came in at $47,100; it was the Patek Philippe Museum. After the sale, the Museum dispatched a representative to this small, westernmost corner of New York to pick up the watch, examine it for authenticity, and hand over a check.
A few Graves pieces also trickled in from other hidden corners. In early 2009 a Connecticut couple contacted the New York office of Antiquorum. They had come into possession of a cushion-shaped platinum Patek Philippe minute-repeater wristwatch crafted in 1927, with the movement no. 198095. The watchmaker had made only a very limited number of such wristwatches in this period, perhaps half a dozen, and Henry Graves, Jr., owned at least two of them. After a dealer they found on the Internet offered them $30,000, the couple decided to try their luck with an auction house. Julien Schaerer, the watch director at Antiquorum USA, inspected the wristwatch and found that it had a broken crystal and missing minute hand. When Schaerer turned it over, to his shock he saw the unmistakable Graves emblem with the motto Esse Quam Videri. Antiquorum checked with the Patek Philippe archives and learned that Graves had acquired the wristwatch on August 16, 1928, during his extended European summer. It went under the hammer in March 2009 and sold for $630,000.
A year later an old Main Line WASP who described himself by saying, “I used to be on top of Wall Street until I found myself at the bottom of a bottle of gin,” decided to see how much he might get for a gold Patek Philippe pocket watch manufactured in the 1920s. Discovered among the discarded contents left in a newly purchased Manhattan apartment, the watch was given to him as a gift, but the gentleman had tucked it away and forgotten about it for years. Several known watch dealers in New York City offered him an appraisal. One, he said, gave it a value of $8,000, another between $10,000 and $12,000. None of them made any mention of the significant crest emblazoned across the back, and he decided to do some investigating on his own. He typed the words Esse Quam Videri and Patek Philippe on his computer and the Internet search spit out links to the sale of the Graves Supercomplication. Floored after reading that the stunner had fetched over $11 million, he finally took the piece to Christie’s. First manufactured in 1913, the chronometer with a thirty-six-hour up-and-down reserve indicator had the movement no. 177483 and had earned a Geneva Observatory prize in 1920. The watch was purchased on October 14, 1921, and afterward the family crest was engraved on the case. It appeared that another of Graves’s watches had turned up quite unexpectedly.
Although not a highly complicated piece, the period of the watch certainly encompassed Graves’s collecting years, and it possessed a first prize from the Geneva Observatory timing competition that he had ardently pursued. The luxury apartment in which the pocket watch turned up had once been owned by Duncan Graves. Christie’s put the watch on the cover of its catalogue for the New York “Important Watches” sale on December 14, 2010, where it sold for $242,500.
• • •
Many Graves and Packard timepieces were known, but considerably more remained mysteries. With a reference and case number, one gained admittance to that history, but the converse was not true. The name of an owner did not necessarily unlock the secrets of a watch’s past. Without a watch’s specific numbers, one ended up searching for treasure without a map.
While the Graves and Packard watches denoted a high level of prestige to those collectors privileged enough to obtain one, for a watchmaker to have manufactured timepieces for this storied pair conferred a validation of a different sort. Throughout history, a watchmaker’s name was made on the timepieces it produced, but its reputation was established by the patrons who favored it.
Since the majority of those Graves and Packard watches that had surfaced over the years were manufactured by Patek Philippe, most had come to believe that the two men had battled it out over their grandes complications at the seat of that firm. It was largely unknown to the contemporary horology market that both men, though faithful clients of Patek, had in fact acquired timepieces from other watchmakers. And the watchmakers of Switzerland had long wished to discover that one or more of these long-forgotten timepieces might come to light at market, offering the kind of invaluable endorsement, like that of a royal warrant, that a Graves and Packard patronage implied.
In 2006 a sheaf of yellowing letters was discovered deep in the archives of Vacheron Constantin on the Quai d’Ile in Geneva. Lying undisturbed for some eighty years, the correspondence had been conducted between Henry Graves, Jr., and the watchmaker. Written during Henry and Florence’s European idyll, the letters spanned the summer and fall of 1928, during which time Henry communicated his desires for a particular Vacheron Constantin pocket watch, culminating in a meeting at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris with Charles Constantin. It was there that he received his tourbillon chronometer, awarded the First First Prize at the Geneva Observatory.
The letters unearthed tangible confirmation that Graves had strayed into the orbit of another Swiss watchmaker, even as Patek Philippe was in the midst of producing his horological tour de force, the Supercomplication. Short of the actual timepiece, it was just the kind of evidence that Swiss watchmakers had hoped for, and it was just the kind of news known to ignite the market. For Vacheron Constantin, it was incontestable proof that Henry Graves, Jr., had patronized its maison on the Quai d’Ile.
As it so happened, a curious story regarding a Vacheron Constantin timepiece had emerged four years earlier. A spectacular eighteen-carat gold pocket watch, movement no. 415946, equipped with ten complications, including a tourbillon split-second perpetual calendar, with an enamel face and manufactured in 1932, was sold at Sotheby’s in New York on October 22, 2002. The grande complication had earned first prize at the Geneva Observatory in 1934 and five years later was presented at the Swiss National Exhibition in Zurich. It was part of the Esmond Bradley Martin estate. A grandson of the Pittsburgh steel magnate Henry Phipps, Martin was a brilliant chess player, wildlife conservationist, orchid breeder, and one of the most important and prodigious watch collectors of modern times. At Sotheby’s the piece realized $295,000.
Following the auction, however, the trail of the watch was said to have taken a murky and somewhat controversial turn. Within weeks the timepiece was flipped among dealers, according to one watch expert, with the price doubling at each sale, before it was finally sold for a reported $2 million to Vacheron Constantin. Almost immediately there were questions about this odd turn of events; chief among them was why the price for this watch had jumped so remarkably high in such a short time. According to this watch expert, a story soon spread that the pocket watch had been part of Henry Graves, Jr.’s collection, which only led to more questions. Why didn’t Vacheron purchase the piece at auction? Did someone in the very small world of horology have information about the watch’s origins that hadn’t been shared at the time of sale? Though the timepiece was indeed superlative, the Sotheby’s auction did not describe its provenance as being part of the Graves collection, maintaining that it was never given such information. Furthermore, the expert who said that he examined the watch before the auction did not recall seeing the Graves coat of arms. A stunner in its own right, had the watch been pronounced as one of Graves’s, the bidding at auction would have pushed the price well beyond the $295,000 it fetched.
Certainly the news that Vacheron Constantin had discovered a previously unknown Graves watch elicited a great deal of excitement. It was the Graves provenance, according to one of the biggest watch dealers in the world, that brought about the astonishing price tag just weeks later. For Vacheron it was a horological triumph; one of the most important watch collectors of the twentieth century had patronized this august watchmaker. It was said that the maison planned to display the piece in the small museum maintained at their flagship salon in Geneva.
The news also prompted a measure of scrutiny. The Graves crest became a point of contention and dispute. Within weeks after it had exchanged several pairs of hands the famous eagle and Esse Quam Videri were rumored to have appeared on the case and then disappeared. Another major expert who attended the sale did not recall seeing the coat of arms, nor did his own extensive records note the connection between Graves and this particular watch. As speculation mounted, there were rumblings that specialists were called in to authenticate the watch, only to have the piece quietly withdrawn and the matter dropped. One of the watch experts mulling over the matter later posited that the process had been manipulated in order to justify its $2 million price tag.
When asked if the watch had indeed been one of Henry Graves, Jr.’s, a representative for the maison offered the following reply: “This piece was destined for Henry Graves, Jr., but Vacheron Constantin finally kept it for communication/promotion purposes. The watch was sold to a private collector in the [19]50s.” The maison also noted that this particular pocket watch, now part of a private collection, did not contain Graves’s famous coat of arms.
With the matter seemingly unresolved, wrapped inside the puzzle surrounding this particular watch was yet another mystery. Henry Graves, Jr., did indeed purchase at least one remarkable pocket watch from the house of Vacheron Constantin, the gold Observatory winner (movement no. 401562), in 1928. However, this pocket watch remains at large, its whereabouts unknown. Should it ever emerge, if this episode is any indication, it is sure to attract an enormous purse.