Jaeger-LeCoultre‘s Métiers Rares series has always been a tribute to famous artworks and their respective artists sys showcasing them on the faces of their iconic Reverso timepieces. Known as the Reverso Tribute Enamel  these latest Limited Editions pay homage to Alfons Mucha, and his series of decorative panels from 1896, The Seasons.

Handcrafted by the Maison’s master engraver, the front-facing sunburst guilloché is visible under the deep colour of the transparent enamelling; each colour requiring hours of research in order to achieve a perfectly even hue that matches painting on the reverse side of the case.  The reproduction of Mucha’s artwork onto the 3cm² surface, is a meticulous process in itself – the master enameler only has a few colours to work with, and also has to anticipate what the colour that the end result would produce, once the several protective layers on top of the design – it’s a sort of “precision guesswork” in trying to predict the intensity of the colours in the final outcome.

In this miniature edition inspired by “Spring” from The Seasons (sorry, at this point, the music geek in me is somehow tying this in with Tchaikovsky’s Seasons, lol) we see a fair-haired girl in a white dress standing beneath a blossoming tree, with branches fashioned into a shape that seems to represent a medieval musical instrument, the lyre. As simple as this design seems, painstaking effort and attention to detail was involved, including the many trials required to reproduce the fluid lines of her dress due to the nature and character of the enamel, as well as the flowers in her hair, birds, and the background. The master engraver then had to also engrave and sculpt the frame against which the artworks are surrounded, by first hollowing out the material after the enamelling process. Great care had to be exercised, in order to ensure that the enamelwork remained as is. The artwork itself requires a total of 100 hours of work (70 for enamelling, and 30 for engraving) for this Limited Edition piece.

This beauty comes in extremely limited quantities — only 8 pieces of these were produced!

Images courtesy of Jaeger-LeCoultre