The “Grosse Pièce” Sets a New Auction Record for Audemars Piguet at Sotheby’s

Sotheby’s inaugural Important Watches auction at the iconic Breuer Building on December 8 was one for the books. The sale, which included timepieces from the Robert M. Olmsted Complications Collection, achieved $42.8 million, more than doubling its high estimate and establishing the highest total ever for a watch auction in the auction house’s history. Among the lots was the “Grosse Pièce,” the most complicated known pocket watch crafted by Audemars Piguet still in private hands, which sold for $7.7 million with fees, setting a new record for the legendary watchmaker to become the most valuable timepiece by the atelier ever sold at auction and the fourth highest price ever achieved for a watch at Sotheby’s. The previous record for an Audemars Piguet watch was $5.2 million for a one-of-one “Black Panther” concept watch; the next highest price was for Gerald Genta’s personal “Royal Oak,” which Sotheby's sold in 2022 for $2.1 million.

“The record-breaking result achieved by Audemars Piguet’s ‘Grosse Pièce’ is nothing short of extraordinary,” Daryn Schnipper, Sotheby’s chairman emeritus, international watch division, said in a statement. “It stands as a powerful reminder of the significance of this collection and the extraordinary heights that important horology can reach.”

The value of the “Grosse Pièce” lies not only in its rarity but in the remarkable convergence of innovations it embodies. Commissioned in 1914 by Smith & Sons of London for an American client and completed in 1921 after six years of meticulous work, it has been confirmed by the Audemars Piguet Heritage Department as the brand’s sole watch to feature an astronomical star chart depicting 18 constellations. It is also the only known Audemars Piguet pocket watch from this period to include a tourbillon, and the pairing of that mechanism with a sky chart and 19 additional complications positions it as a peerless achievement in the history of horlogerie.

With the watch, the buyer will receive an album assembled by the former director of the Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, Martin Werhli, with photocopies of the workbook records, including a copy of the Audemars Piguet Registre d’Établissage listing the movement number, components and the ordering agent, and a copy of two documents referring to the inspection of the jewelling, one dated 1915 and signed Ami Meylan.

The “Grosse Pièce” sold alongside a mix of vintage, modern and independent timepieces, including two previously unknown double-movement Patek Philippe pocket watches commissioned by industrialist John Motley Morehead: the 1924 Double Movement Split Seconds Minute Repeating Watch and a circa-1921 open-faced minute repeater with a double movement, both of which were acquired by the Patek Philippe Museum for a combined $6.2 million. The result follows the record-setting sale of Francis Ford Coppola’s F.P. Journe FFC prototype, which achieved $10.75 million earlier this week at Phillips’ $43.5 million The New York Watch Auction: XIII (the highest-grossing watch auction ever held in the United States).

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