James Debaufre, London

• gilt full plate movement, verge escapement, flat steel balance, balance pivot with ruby jewels to top and bottom, pierced and engraved balance cock, fusee and chain, square baluster pillars • silver champlevé dial, Roman numerals, outer Arabic minute track, central alarm indicator disc, blued steel beetle and poker hands, winding apertures for going and striking trains, female setting square for alarm disc • silver inner case with pierced and engraved scrolling foliage inhabited by birds, engraved lakeside town scene below pendant and grotesque mask below six o'clock, pull repeat cord to the case side between 7 and 8 o'clock, winding square for alarm train to case back, the leather covered outer case with circular piercings and finely decorated with silver piqué work • movement signed Debaufre London

The Van Steenwegen Collection

Habsburg, Feldman, Hong Kong, The Van Cauwenburgh Collection, May 30, 1989, lot 529

David Landes, Revolution in Time, p. 137

Terence Camerer Cuss, The English Watch 1585-1970, p. 148, pl. 77

This watch is signed simply Debaufre London. However, engraved in the same manner, but concealed below the adjacent stop work is ‘IAM’ an abbreviation no doubt for James (Jacques) Debaufre who was born c. 1691. James was apprenticed to Roger Nichols in 1708 and free of the Clockmakers’ Company in 1713.

The Debaufres were a talented Huguenot horological family that left France following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. In 1704, Peter and Jacob Debaufre, together with Nicholas Facio (a native of Basle who came to England in 1687), applied for and were granted a patent for the application of jewels to the pivot holes of watches and clocks. The patent grant met with considerable opposition from the Clockmakers’ Company and was withdrawn, largely due to the fact that patents which restricted scientific advancement were not encouraged. The jewelling of watches, which reduced the friction and wear of parts, was a highly important development in the history of watchmaking, but the difficulty and expense of piercing jewels meant that its use was slowly taken up in England and hardly at all on the continent.

The present lot is likely the only known example of a work by the Debaufres with pierced jewels in a watch.  The balance of the present watch is jewelled with rubies both to the top and bottom, each jewel having a deep blind hole and a brass setting with the ends closed at the edges. The top jewel has a separate blued steel end-piece screwed to the cock, the bottom held in place by a wedge. The fact that the jewels are not pierced right the way through would seem to suggest that this is an early prototypical arrangement. Significantly, no other watches by the Debaufre with pierced jewelling are recorded to have survived from this period.