In the course of its 15-year history, MB&F has partnered with some of the most talented watchmakers of our generation including Kari Voutilainen, Eric Coudray, Stephen McDonnell, Jean-Marc Wiederrecht, and Stepan Sarpaneva, just to name a few. Designers and artists as well, from long-time collaborator Eric Giroud and the iconoclastic Alain Silberstein to sculptor Xia Hang and contemporary painter Sage Vaughn. Now, for the first time, MB&F is putting the work of a traditional artisan in the spotlight, with the LM Split Escapement ‘Eddy Jaquet’ Limited Edition: a series of eight unique pieces featuring the extraordinary imagination and skill of the well-known engraver in depicting the novels of Jules Verne.

Eddy Jaquet was born in 1965, in a small village on the outskirts of Neuchâtel. Having learned his trade at the École d’Arts Appliqués in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Jaquet went straight on to pursue his lifelong vocation of engraver after graduation, in a career that has continued uninterrupted from 1987 to this day. His work is often based on existing stories and cultural narratives, but nevertheless possesses a rich vein of mythopoeia. Eddy Jaquet is recognized as the man whose transformative touch can turn a watch into a rich storytelling tapestry.

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The Legacy Machine Split Escapement ‘Eddy Jaquet’ Limited Edition is a series of eight unique hand-engraved pieces based on the novels of Jules Verne, which are interpreted through Jaquet’s imagination. Eddy Jaquet has been a friend of MB&F since 2011 when the first Legacy Machine featured his skills in the names of Kari Voutilainen and Jean-François Mojon engraved on a movement bridge. The most memorable work of the Neuchatel-based Jaquet is characterized by the depth of its scope and ambition; it is classical in style and heroic in its execution of human figures. In a way, the uniting theme of the LM Split Escapement Eddy Jaquet Limited Edition was inevitable.

Because of its wide expanse of surface available for engraving, the Legacy Machine Split Escapement was a natural choice for this unprecedented collaboration. In his preliminary research for the series, Eddy Jaquet devoured the books of Jules Verne, reading up to 60 novels and short stories by the prolific 19th-century French author. The eight stories that were finally selected to be illustrated in the limited edition include some of his best-loved work such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea but also some of the lesser-known stories such as The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. The eight Jules Verne stories illustrated in the series are: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, Around The World in Eighty Days, Five Weeks In a Balloon, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Michael Strogoff and Robur the Conqueror.

Highly notable is the fact that none of these illustrations are drawn from an existing piece of art. They are conceived by Jaquet after reading the source books by Jules Verne and viewing any other secondary films or creative work based on the books. Each engraving is an intricate tableau of scenes and key moments from the stories, synthesized in the imagination of Jaquet and expressly designed to be interpreted through the medium of the LM Split Escapement engine.

For each unique piece, famed engraver Eddy Jaquet read —or re-read, in some cases— the original work by Jules Verne and viewed any significant secondary creative works based on the books, such as the originally published illustrations —which would have been approved by Jules Verne— or films. He then created his own original sketches on templates of the dial plate, depicting key scenes from each story, sometimes combining several tableaux in a single dial plate as a graphic tapestry of storytelling.

Not only did Jaquet have to exercise his creativity and engraving skill to the utmost, but he was also obliged to practice his craft within the exigencies and limitations set by the LM SE engine. The designated engraving space was the dial plate, which presents a flat upper surface in the main LM SE series, but is actually of variable thickness on its reverse side in order to accommodate the different components of the engine. Engraving the dial plate as if it was uniformly thick throughout was not possible —careful consideration had to be made as to where the thinner areas were, so as not to inadvertently puncture the artistic canvas if a particular section required deep-relief engraving.

From the side of production as well, several adjustments were made to the original LM Split Escapement so as to maximize the available engraving space and allow Jaquet to exhibit his savoir-faire to the fullest. New, open-worked date and power-reserve subdials were created, along with wider dial plates. The bezel was redesigned to be slimmer, and the case dimensions reworked, in order to make space for the wider dial plate. Because the bezel and case dimensions were changed, a new dial crystal had to be produced, with a less pronounced curve to the dome, since its diameter was now increased by 0.5 mm from 44 to 44.5 mm.

To fully bring out each illustrated scene, Jaquet applied a dark rhodium alloy by hand, adjusting the shading of each detail according to the exigencies of the scene. The smoke of the fire on the Michel Strogoff dial, for example, required an attenuated touch, while the underground sea depicted on the Journey to the Center of the Earth dial incorporated gradient-shading techniques. Using the electroplating pen like an artist’s brush, layering the solution in multiple applications, and working with the natural tendency of the rhodium electroplating solution to draw itself along the grooves and surfaces of the dial, Jaquet was able to create a wide range of grey tones to suggest different textures and levels of light.

This mastery of chiaroscuro technique is demonstrated in the smoky fire depicted on the Michel Strogoff dial —ink-dark in some areas and pierced by light in others, billowing around a church steeple as Jules Verne described in his tale.

Between the redesign of a number of components and the actual execution of the engraved dial itself, over 300 hours of additional labor were required for each unique piece of the LM SE ‘Eddy Jaquet’ Limited Edition. The engraved dial plates of the LM SE Eddy Jaquet Limited Edition are inspired by the stories of Jules Verne, the 19th-century French writer widely acknowledged to be the foremost pioneer of science fiction.

The dial plate of the piece inspired by the book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, for example, shows the submarine Nautilus drifting in the depths of the ocean in an unspecified location; a pair of ruined pillars just above the power-reserve dial hints that this is the scene where Captain Nemo and his crew explore the lost city of Atlantis. The dial plate of the piece inspired by Journey to the Center of the Earth, by contrast, brings together scenes of the protagonists descending into the planet’s interior, the subterranean ocean teeming with prehistoric life, and, far off in the distance —spoiler alert!— the erupting volcano that returns them to the surface in the novel’s denouement.

Creating these rich scenes on the limited diameter of the dial plates posed its own particular challenges, some of which Jaquet was able to foresee and plan around, and some that he was obliged to invent solutions for, mid-engraving. While working on the first dial plate to be engraved, the piece inspired by Five Weeks in a Balloon, his detailed project notes include observations about the variable thickness of the dial plate. Although flat on the upper side, the dial plate was highly irregular on its reverse, hollowed out in different places to accommodate the different components of the LM Split Escapement engine.

In the same project notes on this particular dial plate, Jaquet refers to the trio of zebras visible at the date dial, quietly refreshing themselves at a watering hole on the African savannah. These animals were not part of his initial concept sketch but were added late in the engraving process for a key point of aesthetic balance. This, however, required Jaquet to adjust the placement of two nearby hippopotami, highlighting the agility and adaptive skills essential to this delicate project.

Each of the eight unique pieces comes in an 18K red-gold case with a brown alligator strap with a double-folding deployant clasp. The MB&F LM Split Escapement 'Eddy Jaquet' Unique Pieces are works of art by master engraver Eddy Jaquet and are for sure timepieces that will transport you to the deepest confines of Jules Verne’s novels.

Sticker Price $162,000 USD. For more info on MB&F click here.