Patek Philippe: favoured by Joe DiMaggio, John F. Kennedy and George S. Patton
A new exhibition shows how US greats have been some of Patek Philippe’s biggest fans
Everyone passionate about watches and clocks is on a first-name basis with Patek Philippe & Co., the Geneva house founded in 1839. These fanatics will require little persuasion to see “The Art of Watches Grand Exhibition New York 2017,” a clumsy title that is in direct opposition to the elegance of the timepieces on display.
The show—open through June 23 at the Bellini-and-prosciutto pleasure dome known as Cipriani 42nd Street—is rife with horological delights. It is free for the public to enter. It is expensive for emirs, oligarchs, and tycoons to buy the current Patek models on display, such as the New York 2017 Special Edition Ref. 5531, which combines a minute repeater and a world-time mechanism behind a dial that celebrates the Manhattan skyline at its cloisonné-enamel centre of its dial. But someone’s got to do it.
The real treat here, however, is the older stuff, gathered largely from the house’s museum in Geneva, designed in 1919. Other timepieces come from such institutions as the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum, and a few were made available from private collections. The meticulous toil of Patek’s artisans has ensured that even visitors who don’t especially care about watchmaking in itself will nonetheless thrill to witness its results.
Look, for instance, to the US Historical Room, featuring a svelte chronograph (Ref. 130J), measuring only 35 millimeters in diameter, owned by Joe DiMaggio. The Kennedy Clock owned by the 35th president is also here. There’s even some from people who never hooked up with Marilyn Monroe.
Other American Patek owners represented include red-white-and-blue bloods such as jazz titan Duke Ellington, who owned a split-seconds chronograph; early Coca-Cola exec Asa Griggs Chandler, whose rectangular gold watch with Art Deco engraving is a mere 26 millimeters wide; and General George S. Patton, whose parents gave him a pocket watch when he was merely “Lieut. George S. Patton,” as the engraving on its gold case demonstrates.
Many of the stars of the show are pocket watches. While the US room houses an extraordinary collection of complicated pocket watches commissioned by the banker Henry Graves, Jr., elsewhere you will find such gorgeous, double-faced, super complicated models as the Calibre 89, first introduced in 1989 and making its first venture outside the Patek Philippe Museum.