Venice, La Serenissima. Renowned for its extraordinary light and beauty, the city has inspired generations of artists throughout the centuries. Among them was J.M.W. Turner, who found in Venice an inexhaustible source of inspiration. His luminous interpretations of the city not only captured its unique atmosphere but also helped shape the course of landscape painting in Western art.
This September, coinciding with its participation in the Homo Faber Biennale in Venice, Jaeger-LeCoultre pays tribute to the host city with four new limited-edition Reverso Tribute Enamel timepieces. The caseback of each watch features a miniature reproduction of one of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings of La Serenissima, reaffirming Reverso’s role as a canvas for artistic expression.
Expressing a Vision of Art and Culture
Beginning in Europe and now extending worldwide, Homo Faber was created to honour and promote excellence in craft in all its forms. This aligns closely with Jaeger-LeCoultre’s commitment to supporting not only the highly specialised technical crafts inherent to watchmaking but also the artistic crafts associated with Haute Horlogerie. Expressing Jaeger-LeCoultre’s vision of art and culture, the new Reverso Tribute Enamel ‘Turner Series’ pays homage to this shared mission while showcasing the talents and skills of the Manufacture’s in-house Métiers Rares™ atelier.
Turner, a pioneer of modern art: Born in London in 1775, Joseph Mallord William Turner is acknowledged as one of the most influential painters in Western art history. While best known as a landscape painter, his work explored many aspects of the rapidly changing world in which he lived: industrialisation, profound social change and political and economic upheaval. Revealing a precocious talent from an early age, his first works followed the prevailing style of realism. However, rejecting established conventions, he soon developed a far more expressive approach, using loose brushstrokes – and sometimes his thumb or a palette knife – to create dynamic compositions. Employing colour and light not only to represent his subjects but also to evoke emotion, Turner transformed the course of landscape painting and anticipated artistic developments that would emerge many decades later. As a precursor of modern art, he exerted a profound influence on both Impressionism in the late 19th century and Abstract Expressionism in the 20th century. His artistic legacy has continued to shape generations of artists since his death in 1851.
Venice, Turner’s enduring fascination: Turner was intrigued by the very idea of Venice, his imagination fuelled by the writings of Shakespeare and Lord Byron. He made three journeys to the city – in 1819, 1833 and 1840 – the first when he was already a mature artist of 44. Each visit took place in late summer, when humidity shrouds the canals in a soft haze and the light seems to make the buildings levitate above the lagoon. Although Turner exhibited only 25 Venetian paintings during his lifetime, his output was remarkably prolific: over the course of his three visits, he produced some 150 watercolours and as many as 900 drawings in less than four weeks. His oil paintings of Venice were created later, upon his return to his London studio.
Intricate Craftsmanship Celebrates the Métiers Rares™
Capturing Turner’s light in enamel: The new Reverso Tribute Enamel timepieces unite the crafts of enamel miniature painting and paillonné enamelling on the casebacks with guillochage and enamel on the dials. The swivelling case of the Reverso lends itself naturally to artistic decoration and Jaeger-LeCoultre has used the blank metal reverse side of the case as a canvas on which its enamellers have created a series of highly accurate, miniaturised reproductions of celebrated works of art. To reproduce the shimmering beauty of Turner’s paintings, each Reverso Tribute Enamel timepiece requires approximately 80 hours of work.
As Turner’s works were of different formats, each view was cropped to capture the essence of the composition while also fitting the portrait orientation of the Reverso case. For each watch, the first of many challenges was to miniaturise the original works – the largest measuring 68 x 91 cm – to 2 cm², literally postage-stamp size, without losing any detail.
Equally important was capturing the ethereal quality of light and its shimmering effect on the water, as well as recreating Turner’s subtle interplay of perspective that characterises the original paintings. To achieve the ‘floating’ effect created by the clouds required the enameller to work across multiple enamel planes – a complex technique that began with the enameller to painting the clouds as part of the original miniature work, then applying (and firing) two layers of translucent enamel to those areas. The clouds are then repainted on top of these translucent layers before two more layers of translucent enamel are applied over the entire surface. To enhance the limpid effect of the light, the enameller used the craft of paillonage on areas depicting water, applying a sheet of silver leaf over the base enamel before beginning to paint the image with translucent coloured enamel.
To achieve the desired effects, each work required 14 layers of enamel – three base layers, four layers of painting and seven layers of translucent ‘fondant’ – with separate firings at 800°C after each layer. Discreetly positioned on each image, a secret signature in the form of a gold-leaf paillon identifies the enameller who created the piece.
The dialogue of guillochage and enamel: The colourful dials are decorated with meticulously hand-guilloché patterns beneath translucent Grand Feu enamel, with the patterns and colours chosen in response to the miniature paintings on the casebacks.
Capturing the light with every movement of the wrist, the intricate hand-guilloché patterns are engraved using a manually operated rose engine lathe, requiring up to 1,080 passages of the lathe. After completion of the guillochage, the enamelling requires an additional eight to nine hours of work for each dial, with up to five layers of enamel and six or seven separate firings at 800°C. The final challenge is the faultless application of the faceted indexes (requiring tiny holes to be drilled through the pristine enamel without cracking it) and the transfer of the chemin de fer minute track. The simplicity of the faceted applied hour-markers and Dauphine hands – design codes shared with every Reverso Tribute model – places full value on the beauty of the decoration.
The Light of Venice: Four Evocative Works Recreated in Miniature
While rich in detail, much of the art that Turner created in Venice was less about depicting the city itself than about exploring how the moods of nature – the light, the water and the sky – unfolded against the backdrop of Venice. Compelling and atmospheric, his paintings of La Serenissima capture the city’s fragility and fading glory as well as its grandeur, with a sense of melancholy behind its beauty. The artist evokes the transient effects of light, atmosphere and time with an almost cinematic quality, so that the viewer is not simply looking at an image but experiencing it with multiple senses.
Venice, the Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore: Chosen as the setting for the Homo Faber Biennale, the island of San Giorgio Maggiore sits directly across the lagoon from St Mark’s Square. In Turner’s painting, made in 1834, the emphasis is on light, colour and reflection, with the bright white façade of the island’s eponymous church anchoring the composition and rows of buildings receding into the hazy distance. Silver paillons incorporated beneath the enamel enrich the texture of the lagoon, lending exceptional brilliance to the water and intensifying its constantly shifting reflections. The bustling activity of Venetian life – traders’ sailing boats, small vessels loaded with provisions and gondolas ferrying passengers across the canal – contrasts with the barely rippling surface of the lagoon. The green tones of the water are echoed on the dial, which is decorated with a new guilloché pattern, soleil croisé, creating a subtle texture beneath layers of richly lustrous enamel. This guilloché comprises 180 finely engraved lines, each executed in six successive passages of the rose-engine lathe, for a total of 1,080 passages.
Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute: The hazy light brings a remarkable sense of depth to this view, with the foundations of the buildings seeming to merge into their reflections in the water and their architectural details sublimated by the atmospheric effect of light. Delicately applied silver paillons beneath the enamel heighten the texture of the water, capturing the subtle reflections and shimmering luminosity that define Turner’s vision of Venice. Painted in 1835, this work clearly demonstrates Turner’s evolving style, as he adapts watercolour techniques to oil painting – an innovation denounced by traditionalists that would nevertheless revolutionise the landscape genre. Based on a pencil sketch made by Turner during his first visit to Venice, the composition reflects studies developed further after his second visit in 1833. The green tone of the water is echoed in the Grand Feu enamel dial, where a rice-grain guilloché pattern creates constantly changing effects of light and shade as the wrist turns, echoing Turner’s rendering of Venice’s shimmering atmosphere. This vertical barleycorn guilloché is achieved through 70 precisely engraved lines, each requiring six successive passages of the rose-engine lathe, for a total of 420 operations.
Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace & Custom House, Venice: A direct tribute to the great 18th-century Venetian artist Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, this is the first view of Venice that Turner painted in oils, completed 14 years after his initial visit to the city. Although not shown in this crop, the original painting depicts Canaletto seated at his easel in the far left of the composition. With reflections smudged by the hazy atmosphere of a late-summer day, the buildings appear to float between the lagoon and the sky, the rosy coral colour of the Doge’s Palace providing a counterpoint to the green of the water and the bright cerulean tone of the sky. The subtle reflections of the lagoon are further enhanced by delicate silver paillons beneath the enamel, adding remarkable texture to the water while amplifying its luminous interplay with light. The pure blue sky is echoed in the dial, where a basket-weave guilloché, composed of 46 finely engraved lines executed in six successive passages of the rose-engine lathe, is overlaid with translucent blue Grand Feu enamel, creating a shimmering effect as it catches the light.
Venice, the Bridge of Sighs. In this view of Venice, painted in 1840, Turner captures both the beauty and the decline of the city, contrasting the darker foreground with the glowing light reflected on the buildings. The effect is further enhanced by silver paillons beneath the enamel, which bring exceptional texture to the water while revealing ever-changing reflections as the light plays across the surface. Through the human figures, he expresses his concern for the profound social and economic changes of his time and, when he exhibited the painting, he accompanied it with two lines of a poem adapted from Byron, who had been deeply moved by the fall of the Venetian Republic: “I stood upon a bridge, a palace and a prison on each hand.” The subtle lavender tint in the blue sky is carried over to the Grand Feu enamel dial, where a wavy hand-guilloché pattern evokes the rippling reflections of light on Venice’s canals. This wide and deep horizontal wave guilloché is achieved through 41 precisely engraved lines, each requiring nine successive passes, for a total of 369 passages.
Calibre 822, a timeless movement: Like all time-only Reverso Tribute models, the watches of the Reverso Tribute Enamel ‘Turner Series’ are fitted with the manually wound Calibre 822, developed by Jaeger-LeCoultre specifically for the Reverso and a cornerstone of the collection for more than two decades. Shaped to fit the rectangular case, it measures just under 3 mm in height, ensuring the slender profile of the Reverso case and exceptional comfort on the wrist. With a power reserve of 42 hours and a frequency of 21,600 vibrations per hour (3 Hz), Calibre 822 delivers reliable precision, uniting fine watchmaking with the decorative crafts of guillochage, enamelling, paillonage and miniature painting.
Offered in a limited edition of 10 pieces per model, the Reverso Tribute Enamel ‘Turner Series’ is a tribute to the city hosting the Homo Faber Biennale.
