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The latest edition of the Arnold & Son Catalogue is lavishly illustrated and comes with new chapters and an entirely overhauled design. Its content ranges from the legends behind the brand to a full presentation and description of each model and their movements, all manufactured in-house. In this year’s catalogue, Arnold & Son is proud to present five new manufacture movements. Copies of the catalogue are available from authorized Arnold & Son retailers and distributors or can be downloaded from our website at www.arnoldandson.com

In 2014, Arnold & Son celebrated its 25oth anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, the company has launched five new in-house movements and various special editions that pay tribute to the achievements of John Arnold and his son. The father-and-son duo played a major role in the direction taken by English watchmaking. They combined a finely developed aesthetic sense with the ability to solve complex technological problems, and created some superb movements and designs with cutting-edge mechanical features that garnered several patents. Referring to the latest publication, Philippe Boven, Executive Vice President of Arnold & Son, has this to say: “We are tremendously proud of the new Arnold & Son catalogue. It’s a good fifty pages longer than the previous edition and contains a wealth of fascinating detail about fine-quality haute horlogerie and the superb features and functions that typify our timepieces.” The history section of the catalogue also details John Arnold’s life and describes the regard in which he was held by King George III, and his fellow watchmakers, including A.-L. Breguet himself.

Moving on from past to present, the catalogue presents a brief overview of the brand’s development and production facilities in La Chaux-de-Fonds. It also explains how Arnold & Son belongs to a select group of watchmaking companies in Switzerland entitled to call themselves a manufacture – the French term for a watch manufacturing company that designs, develops and produces its movements in its own workshops. An impressive collection of Arnold & Son calibres, with a complete range of sophisticated complications, reflects the brand’s prowess in this field. Unlike other watch manufacturers, which often use the same calibre for different models, Arnold & Son develops a new movement for every single model. Every Arnold & Son movement thus has its own story to tell and reflects the brand’s heritage.

Before moving on to consider the brand’s two collections, the catalogue features a section entitled Métiers d’Art. This chapter looks at Arnold & Son’s mastery of the art of embellishing dials and movements with hand-engravings and miniature paintings. One of the latest examples of this exquisite art form is the HMS Beagle Set of three watches, each depicting a different view of Charles Darwin’s survey ship in meticulous detail. Subsequently, the catalogue details the Royal Collection, a reflection of elegance and sophistication in the inimitable English style. It was inspired by and pays tribute to the timepieces produced in the earlier part of Arnold’s life and made by John Arnold for King George III and members of the royal court. The Royal Collection demonstrates the brand’s mastery of sophisticated complications such as the tourbillon chronograph, equation of time and true solar time, and the big date, month and multiple time zones. Two spectacular new additions to the Royal Collection are the TES Tourbillon and the TEC1, both housed like the other members of the Collection in exquisitely elegant cases. The two timepieces are considered in more detail later in the catalogue.

The timepieces produced during the second part of John Arnold’s career and, after his death, by his son, John Roger were the inspiration for the Instrument Collection. Designed as chronometers to deliver absolute precision, they were the work of watchmakers dedicated to solving the problem of determining longitude accurately at sea. So successful were they that Arnold & Son became principal suppliers of marine chronometers to the British Royal Navy. Distinctly purist in design, the Instrument Collection combines marine precision with aesthetic perfection and draws on several of John Roger’s timepieces, where the design permits the main complication to take centre stage. Three new additions to the Instrument Collection – the DSTB true beat seconds, the DTE double tourbillon and the CTB true beat chronograph – uphold this great tradition. Like the Royal Collection, they are a sublime expression of a long and proud heritage.