M
ost enthusiastic horophiles will have heard regular predictions promising “the return of the pocket watch” — yet street sightings of people digging into waistcoats to check the time with the urgency of the White Rabbit from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland remain conspicuously few and far between.
At the very highest echelons of watch collecting, however, the pocket watch remains the quiet king of portable horology, a fact that Sotheby’s hopes to reinforce in December, when it sends a unique set of four Patek Philippe Star Calibre models across the block with a (conservative) estimate of $10m.
It is the second-highest auction estimate applied in the category, only beaten by another Patek pocket watch, the legendary Henry Graves Supercomplication, which was given an “on request” estimate of more than $11m when it came to auction in 2014 — before selling for a record-setting $24m.
In the 11 years since, though, prices for the best of the best watches have largely increased, and the fact that Sotheby’s describes the appearance at auction of the Star Calibre set as a “once in a generation” event means the Graves record could feasibly be broken.
