Reading Time at HSNY: Form Time to Time
This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarians. Today’s post was written by Miranda Marraccini.
Picture this: you roll up to a meeting at work a few minutes early. Eyeing the empty seats around the perimeter of the conference table, you put your hand in your pocket and pull out…a tiny pair of deep red cherries. Is it some bizarre snacking ritual, your team wonders? A display of power over your dilatory direct reports? Suddenly, you pop open one of the cherries with a flourish, revealing a watch dial where the pit should be. You were checking the time! Everyone in the conference room is impressed and astonished.
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Thank you for indulging me in this scene. It’s imaginary, but the watch I described is very real, made in Geneva around 1830. Each cherry is about 20 mm across; the non-watch cherry contains perfume (image 1). These kinds of fantastical watches in unusual shapes are often called “form watches”; I contributed to an article in The New York Times about them in 2023.
At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, improvements in the technology of enameling and engraving on metal encouraged creativity in watch production. Artisans conjured realistic but tiny fruits, animals, hot air balloons, and different miniaturized musical instruments including lyres, mandolins, and even bagpipes. They are meant to be beautiful first, but they also show off the technical mastery of the Genevan artisans who created them–it is very difficult to create such tiny watch movements–ones as small as 10 mm across.
In “Watches of Fantasy,” a book in our library at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), Fabienne Sturm has some ideas about why form watches were created, including to soften the inevitable blow of time passing. Time “endears himself to us when we measure his passing in the heel of a wooden shoe or under the wings of a pair of doves,” Sturm writes (I’ve included an image of the shoe she references in the header above.)
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I think this idea of watches reminding us of the bittersweet reality of time is especially true of watches that depict creatures that we think of as ephemeral, like butterflies or ladybugs. These watches demonstrate that time is passing on their dials, but also rebel against the effects of time by using materials that will last for centuries: imagine a fresh apple that never rots, a tulip always blooming. In image 2, an ornately enameled polychrome pear opens up to reveal not only a watch, but also a “perfume flask, portrait holder, mirror, and beauty-spot box.” You might notice perfume coming up a few times in this article–the way that scent evokes memory and desire seems to have a historical connection with horology. (That’s why we bottled our own HSNY fragrance!)
In Europe, form watches or fantasy watches reached the peak of their popularity at the beginning of the 19th century. This was before the wristwatch was invented. Both men and women were wearing their watches on chains, and as a result, the watches were often concealed in their pockets. According to Genevieve Cummins in “How the Watch Was Worn,” women first started to wear their watches on display on ornamental chatelaines, which also attached other useful objects like scissors and keys. Then they began to wear the watches alone as pendants around their necks.
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One from about 1830 is a watch in the form of a large key, which is also a pencil holder (image 3). Often, the watch dial is concealed beneath an enamel or metal cover. Some of the watches move: a flower bud that opens to reveal a dial inside, or a butterfly that spreads its wings. Some of them even contain musical automata.
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I particularly enjoy a little pistol from the early 1800s (image 4). It’s elaborately enameled and be-pearled, with a hidden compartment in the handle that conceals a tiny watch dial. If you pull the trigger, pop! Suddenly, a flower bud blooms from the end of the pistol, which in turn squirts perfume from its center. I think I personally like this one because of the way it takes an object associated with violence and makes it incredibly delicate and gem-like.
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I also like watches shaped like snails because they take advantage of the snail’s natural curved shell, and I think there’s a funny play on the idea of a snail moving slowly while time rushes ahead (image 5). Probably the most surprising animal I’ve seen represented as a watch is a sheep (image 6). Turn the sheep over and the reverse shows a lion (well, an approximation of a lion, if you squint). It’s a watch, it’s a parable, it’s a warning.
Some of the watches are “curio watches”—not meant to be worn or even really carried, they perform a second and even third function besides telling time. These include watches built into beauty-spot cases, vinaigrettes, glasses cases, snuff boxes, salt shakers, bouquet holders, and notebooks. From the 19th century onward, watches were built into cufflinks, cane handles (image 7), cigarette lighters, purses, compacts for makeup, card cases, and even mechanical pencils (as in one made by Tiffany & Co., in image 8).
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Image 9, from the book “A Dictionary of Wonders: Van Cleef & Arpels,” shows a 1934 example of an accessory called a minaudière. This little case, usually made of guillochéd metal and sometimes ornamented with jewels, could fulfill all the necessary public functions for a liberated woman of the 1920s: a detachable clip that could be reconfigured into a brooch, a makeup case, a mirror, a cigarette holder, a lighter, and of course, a watch. In image 9, the watch dial pops out from behind a rectangular hinged cover on the right side of the case.
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In the 1960s, there was a fashion for pendant watches again. One that seems to come up a lot is a ladybug or beetle, often marketed to kids (You can see an example in the 1966 Oris ad reproduced in “How the Watch was Worn,” image 10). The wings open to reveal the watch underneath. My mom remembers wearing (and treasuring!) her ladybug watch in the 1960s. They’re still made today and vintage examples are being sold on places like Etsy. You can ogle some charming 20th-century examples of pendant watches and ring watches on the Little Old Watches Instagram account, run by Kaitlin Koch.
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As wristwatches became more popular in the 20th century, fewer people were wearing pendant watches and pocket watches. It’s not as feasible to wear a wristwatch in the form of a strawberry or a tiny shoe, so form watches or fantasy watches became rarer. But one could argue that the tradition of novelty watches is carried on in character watches, shaped like Garfield, Kermit, or C-3PO (image 11, from “Comic Character Wristwatches”).
Very recently, modern watchmakers have taken up the idea of watches shaped like animals, for example, a spider or a T. rex. One company heavily invested in these whimsical watches is Maximilian Büsser & Friends (known as MB&F). Image 12, from “MB&F the First Fifteen Years,” shows the “JwlryMachine,” a watch collaboration between MB&F and Boucheron in the shape of an owl. Under a translucent feathery breast carved out of rose quartz, the winding rotor swings, “to mimic the beating of the owl’s heart.”
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Some of these watches verge on automata, which could be a whole other article. And some automata run on watchwork, but no longer incorporate a dial that tells the time: a tortoise (another famously slow mover), and a snail with a hare’s head (moving both slowly and quickly).
What if your watch, instead of a simple circle or cushion case, could be a tiny pizza slice or miniature rocket ship? What would you want your fantasy form watch to look like? The watches in this article are proof that form doesn’t need to follow function; form is an independent entity, a wild creature without limits, following nothing.