Jaquet Droz, which in 2018 marks 280 years since its founder and namesake began making watches under his own name, has a deep-rooted history in automatons, repeating and chiming mechanisms, musical birds, and elaborately decorated pocketwatches. The modern company, now part of the Swatch Group, pays tribute to all these hallmarks with a unique piece it introduced at Baselworld 2018, the Jaquet Droz Parrot Repeater Pocket Watch.
The Jaquet Droz Parrot Repeater Pocket Watch is a one-of-a-kind piece paying tribute to the founders history of bird automata.
Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721 – 1790), throughout his prolific career, made scores of clocks, watches, and music boxes that featured singing bird automata ? moving mechanical devices in the shape of human beings or animals ? often in collaboration with his son Henri-Louis, and his eponymous brand has paid tribute to this history in recent years with its extremely complex and highly limited Bird Repeater wristwatches. The Parrot Repeater, the first of the so-called Automata Collection to use a pocketwatch case (which, of course, would have been the preferred style of Pierre Jaquet-Droz, whose entire career preceded the rise of the wrist-borne timekeeper) is the most complex and most limited to date ? a literal one-of-a-kind timepiece with five animations on the dial and a host of decorative techniques and gem-setting adorning its 56 mm, 18k rose gold case. A family of macaws comes to animated life on the miniature-painted, mi...