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Breguet inaugurated its exposition in the Sully Wing of the Louvre Museum on June 25. This long-expected event is an excellent publicity stunt on the part of the watchmaking company, which provides an opportunity to admire numerous watches by Breguet, both from the Louvre’s own collection and from the Breguet Museum. Among watches, clocks, measuring instruments and watch making tools, as well as portraits, archival documents and patents are items loaned from private collections and such institutions as the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, the Kremlin Museum and the Swiss National Museum. Many of the items on view are presented to the general public for the first time. The exhibition, sub-titled ‘An Apogee of European Watchmaking’, will be held at the Louvre Museum till September 7, after which it will travel to other famous museums.

Visitors of the exhibition will discover the history of Breguet through the retrospective of the works of Abraham-Louis Breguet, France’s finest master watchmaker, whose timepieces were popular among Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and other noblemen at the court of Versailles. One of the purchasers of the watches created by Abraham-Louis was Josephine Bonaparte to whom he sold Breguet No. 611, the small medallion “tact watch,” currently displayed at the Louvre. The fame of the watchmaker reached so high a level that in 1783 he received a commission for an extraordinary watch incorporating all the innovations and complications known at the time. This famous watch, Breguet No. 160, also called the “Marie-Antoinette,” finally developed four years after Abraham-Louis Breguet’s death, also makes part of the exhibition. Over the course of life, the Swiss-born French watchmaker invented the subscription watch, a simple watch with one hand; the tact watch, with which the wearer could tell the time by touch, and the tourbillon regulator; which compensated the effects of gravity on a watch’s works. For his outstanding inventions, Abraham-Louis Breguet was appointed Watchmaker to the Royal Navy and given a seat in the Academy of Sciences.

The exhibited timepieces are distinguished by the by functional simplicity combined with technical mastery, original style and superb craftsmanship. Flat watchcases, extremely legible and readable numerals, rectilinear hands and guilloched dials are features of extremely inventive and practical Breguet watches which make them stand out among pretentious timepieces made in the last quarter of the 18th century.

Creating modern Breguet timepieces, watchmakers of the company carry on the tradition set by its founder. If you want to become owner of one of the legendary timepieces, but do not have the opportunity, consider purchasing a replica Breguet watch which looks exactly the same, but costs much less.