Unveiling the Mystery: The Van Gogh Hidden in the Painting
[Watch Home Horology Culture] Whether it is fate or sorrow, many great artists who have exerted far-reaching influence on today's world gained fame only after their death. Vincent Willem van Gogh, the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, is such an example. In his short life, only one of his paintings was ever sold. It might be by choice that, since his birth in 1853, Van Gogh's early career had little connection with painting (although many relatives of the then prestigious Van Gogh family were engaged in art trading, and Van Gogh also had relevant experience). It was not until 1880, after he was incredibly dismissed by the church for his missionary work in a mining area and suffered repeated blows from love affairs afterward, that he lost faith in God and life, wandered from city to city, and found a new direction in painting. It was from 1880 that Van Gogh's painting career truly began, and it continued until the end of his life.
Van Gogh Self-Portrait He suffered a mental breakdown and cut off one of his ears at the end of 1888
Meanwhile, in another region of Europe, there was a workshop that was equally committed to its original aspirations. Relying on the founder's own talent and inventions, it created a legend of an era. This is Jaeger-LeCoultre. In the mid-19th century, the Swiss watch industry had not yet reached the scale of a global watch powerhouse. Watches still relied on multiple small family workshops for outsourced production and subsequent assembly. Antoine LeCoultre, the founder of Jaeger-LeCoultre, and his son Elie gathered local watchmakers together to exchange and share craftsmanship. This model allowed watchmaking technology to develop rapidly. The patents and inventions launched by watchmaker Antoine LeCoultre further promoted the development of the workshop. From a traditional family-owned workshop, Jaeger-LeCoultre gradually expanded into a "Grande Maison" with hundreds of craftsmen. Later, Jaeger-LeCoultre's continuous exploration in watchmaking technology and super complex complications earned it a reputation in the global market.
Jaeger-LeCoultre Art Workshop
One is an artist who lived in the middle and late 19th century but exerted a profound influence on the 20th-century Western art world; the other is a watchmaking workshop founded in the early 19th century that made outstanding contributions to the history of world mechanical timekeeping. They had no intersection in the past hundreds of years of history. When Jaeger-LeCoultre gradually realized the importance of art to culture, it resolutely devoted itself to artistic creation and artistic inheritance. Thus, in this era, they have had intimate encounters time and time again.
Van Gogh in Sunflowers
2015 marked the 125th anniversary of Van Gogh's death, and a wave of artistic tributes to Van Gogh swept across the world. Van Gogh's works were exhibited in multiple countries, including China, in the form of multimedia. To celebrate this memorable occasion, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, Van Gogh's home country, joined forces with multiple institutions to hold commemorative events in countries where Van Gogh once lived, such as France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Through the introduction of the Gassels family, a renowned Dutch jewelry and watch merchant that is an important partner of Jaeger-LeCoultre, Jaeger-LeCoultre launched a cooperation with the Van Gogh Museum and launched a limited edition Reverso à Eclipse tribute watch based on Van Gogh's Sunflowers.
Van Gogh's Sunflowers
Van Gogh created nearly 2,200 works throughout his life, among which more than ten are sunflower-themed works. From mid-1888 to early 1889, Van Gogh was fascinated by the sunflowers in Arles, southern France, where he lived. This flower with strong sun-like color and vitality brought him a lot of spiritual comfort. After 1885, inspired by the bright and bold use of color in Japanese ukiyo-e, Parisian Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, he gradually abandoned the gloomy and dark tones he had used before and turned to brighter colors. In 1888, he created many world-famous works, and Sunflowers was painted during this period. He painted sunflowers multiple times before entering a psychiatric hospital in 1889. The bright colors of Sunflowers reflect a sunny spirit; he used these paintings to decorate his living environment in the "Yellow House" and express himself through color.
Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso à Eclipse Sunflowers Watch
Jaeger-LeCoultre selected the oil on canvas Sunflowers in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands as the creative blueprint. The enamel masters of the brand's art workshop made meticulous preparations and adopted the highly difficult miniature enamel painting process to reproduce the work on the dial of the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso à Eclipse. Reverso à Eclipse is an extraordinary special art watch series within the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso collection. In 2006, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the birth of the Reverso series, Jaeger-LeCoultre specially created this unique series. Through a roller at the 2 o'clock position, the louvered dial can be opened, closed, or even set to a half-open position, presenting a magical dial effect. Later, the thematic range of the series expanded gradually, and it has become a representative art series of Reverso and even of Jaeger-LeCoultre.
The Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso à Eclipse Sunflowers themed watch features an 18K rose gold case, with a total limited production of 5 pieces. It is equipped with Jaeger-LeCoultre's ultra-thin small manual-winding round movement Calibre 849, which has a thickness of only 1.85 millimeters and a 35-hour power reserve. Using such a small movement is to leave more space for accommodating the 192 components of the louvered dial and the enamel dial. On this unique enamel dial, Jaeger-LeCoultre's enamel masters need to fire multiple layers of white grand feu enamel on the metal blank dial. Then, on this base, they use small brushes and enamel glaze of different colors as "pigment" to micro-paint Sunflowers on the small dial in proportion to the original work, followed by multiple firing processes. Since the original work is an oil painting, the varying brushstrokes pose great challenges to miniature enamel painting. The enamel masters have to carefully handle every detail to reproduce the charm of the original work in enamel form.
Van Gogh Self-Portrait The Artist as He Saw Himself
In 2016, when the Reverso series celebrated its 85th anniversary, Jaeger-LeCoultre cooperated with the Van Gogh Museum again. Taking Van Gogh's famous self-portrait as the design inspiration for the Reverso à Eclipse watch, it launched another Reverso à Eclipse timepiece. Self-portraits are a very important part of Van Gogh's works, capturing the artist's expression and posture while painting. The work selected by Jaeger-LeCoultre was painted by Van Gogh between 1887 and 1888, when he was about to leave Paris for Arles, France. This work follows the traditional format of a standard artist self-portrait, with a similar style to Rembrandt's self-portrait The Artist at his Easel and Cézanne's self-portrait.
Van Gogh Self-Portrait
After completing this self-portrait, Van Gogh wrote a letter to his close younger sister, giving a detailed description of the work: a gray face with a hint of red, wrinkles at the corners of the mouth and forehead, green eyes, thick messy red beard that looks untrimmed for a long time, giving the whole figure a dejected look, and so on. He then added in the letter that he no longer looked like that in reality: he had cut his hair and beard, and his clothes were not blue either. All these descriptions show the characteristics of Van Gogh as a Post-Impressionist artist — he painted not what he saw, but what he perceived, that sense of stagnation. The work has been processed by him, and it also reflects his thoughts on his identity, spirit and state of life.
Jaeger-LeCoultre reproduces Van Gogh's classic works through miniature enamel painting
Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso à Eclipse Van Gogh Self-Portrait Watch
Building on the experience of rendering Van Gogh's works in the 2015 Reverso à Eclipse series and the 10 years of successful experience of the series in reproducing world-famous paintings, the 2016 Reverso à Eclipse watch once again presents Van Gogh's self-portrait with extremely delicate miniature enamel craftsmanship. Under the hand of miniature enamel artisans, the blue collarless work coat Van Gogh wears in the painting, the colors on the palette, the paintbrush in his hand, the easel, his messy red beard, and the wrinkles on his forehead and around his mouth are all reproduced one by one. Even the texture brought by oil painting is fully presented as much as possible. Only superb enamel craftsmanship can handle such a difficult miniature painting.
The 2016 new Reverso à Eclipse Van Gogh Self-Portrait watch is limited to 4 pieces. It is also equipped with Jaeger-LeCoultre's classic small manual movement Calibre 849, features a platinum case, is priced at 101,000 euros (110,000 US dollars) per piece, and was exhibited at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Starry Night Over the Rhône and The Starry Night Van Gogh's Turmoil
Of course, the collaboration between Jaeger-LeCoultre and Van Gogh's works is not limited to the Reverso à Eclipse series. Combining Jaeger-LeCoultre's extraordinary craftsmanship with high-level mechanical watchmaking technology, the brand launched a master ultra-complicated minute repeater watch based on Van Gogh's famous work Starry Night Over the Rhône. Starry Night Over the Rhône was created in 1888. Against the night sky rendered by short cool-toned dark blue strokes, the reflections of lake and lights are dotted with bright yellow. The strong contrast highlights the tranquility of the night. Although the blue starry sky appears extremely deep, an elderly couple walks by the lake in the lower right corner of the painting. This peaceful scene brings warmth and serenity to the viewer's heart.
Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Ultra Thin Tradition Starry Night Over the Rhône Minute Repeater
Jaeger-LeCoultre's Master Ultra Thin Tradition minute repeater watch chose this painting, and the musical chime of the minute repeater adds more vividness to the picture. The watch is made of 18K gold, limited to 18 pieces, and its movement contains 437 components. Under the exquisite depiction of miniature enamel, this Van Gogh work is vividly condensed into the 39mm dial, with all details faithful to the original painting, which cannot help but make people marvel at the subtlety and excellence of Jaeger-LeCoultre's enamel craftsmanship.
However, when talking about Van Gogh's famous works, the iconic The Starry Night can never be missed. This work was created when Van Gogh was receiving treatment in a psychiatric sanatorium, and fully embodies the abstract style of Impressionism. The twisted sky and swirling night express the melancholy and psychedelic state of Van Gogh's spiritual world at that time. Deep blue-green is one of Van Gogh's favorite colors. The combination of orange, bright yellow and dark gray presents a starry sky that makes people feel disoriented, which is completely different from the beautiful starry sky ordinary people imagine, yet this is exactly the starry sky in Van Gogh's mind at that time. Thus, Jaeger-LeCoultre also reproduced this most representative work of Van Gogh in miniature through the miniature enamel process, integrating it wonderfully into a Master Grande Tradition tourbillon watch. It features an 18K white gold case, is equipped with a 978 automatic winding movement, and is limited to 18 pieces.
Conclusion: There is only a thin line between genius and madness. Van Gogh's most accomplished works were actually created when he was trapped in mental distress. The suffering of reality pushed him into the valley of spiritual despair prematurely. Although painting brought him new hope, it ultimately failed to free him from the troubles of reality. Van Gogh's works have profoundly influenced 20th-century Western art history, and still inspire many people today. Jaeger-LeCoultre, which also came across time from the 19th century, brings a cross-boundary dialogue between arts through its exquisite enamel art and mechanical watchmaking craftsmanship, and gives new vitality to Van Gogh's works in a new form. (Photo/Text Watch Home Wu Yibing)