Audemars Piguet Brings Home a Forgotten Giant of Astronomical Watchmaking
Audemars Piguet reacquires the historic Grosse Pièce, a landmark astronomical pocket watch, returning to Le Brassus after a century.
Audemars Piguet has marked its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary with a significant homecoming.
At Sotheby's New York, the maison secured the S. Smith and Son Astronomical Watch known as the Grosse Pièce for 7.7 million US dollars, a record for any Audemars Piguet timepiece sold at auction. For the first time in more than a century, the watch will return to Le Brassus.
Commissioned in 1914 and completed in 1921, the Grosse Pièce stands among the most ambitious pocket watches ever produced by the brand.
Housed in eighteen-carat yellow gold, it incorporates nineteen complications equalling the complexity of the famed Universelle of 1899.
Its defining feature is a detailed astronomical chart showing London's night sky with three hundred and fifteen stars and eighteen constellations. It remains the only historical Audemars Piguet watch to present such a depiction.
Alongside this celestial display, the watch features sidereal time, a minute repeater, full and small striking mechanisms, a perpetual calendar, moon phases, a chronograph, the equation of time and a tourbillon.
Together, these functions illustrate the depth of craftsmanship found in the Vallée de Joux during the early twentieth century when specialists collaborated across the region through the établissage tradition.
After its delivery to its American client, the watch disappeared from public view for decades. It resurfaced only in 1970 when collector Robert M. Olmsted acquired it, and it remained in his collection until the recent Sotheby's sale.
Its reappearance offered scholars and collectors a rare opportunity to study a piece that had largely vanished into legend.
Audemars Piguet will now present the Grosse Pièce on a curated world tour before installing it permanently at the Musée Atelier in Le Brassus.
There, it will join the Universelle, creating a historic pairing of the two most complex pocket watches ever made by the maison.
The reacquisition strengthens the brand's archival heritage and ensures that one of its greatest achievements can be preserved and appreciated within the cultural landscape that produced it.
