Only a handful of elite brands were capable of autonomous movement manufacture, with the rest purchasing their movements in raw, unfinished form and then reworking these as required, adding their signatures in the process. Movado was always a maker of its own in-house movements. This was one of the really great automatic watches offered in the immediate post-war period and contains a movement that is in every way the equal of its rivals from the same era by Rolex, Jaeger LeCoultre and Omega. Having advised the purchase of a Movado manufactured before World War II in the previous paragraph, there is now going to be a contradiction and a recommendation that the 1950s Movado Kingmatic is something of an essential inclusion in any collection that charts the development of the self-winding timepiece. If we were in the market for a representative sample of Movado’s best work, we would look further back in time than the Museum Watch and try to acquire a tidy pre-war piece. We have to come clean and say that the Museum Watch has never aesthetically appealed to us, though we accept that it is a design classic and have sold several of them to delighted buyers in the past. Its name came about because of Movado’s reputation as being the brand of watches that was favoured by major museums in their collections. Offered from 1947, this was the product of Bauhaus inspired designer Nathan George Horwitt, its distinctive feature being a jet black dial on which the only form of decoration was a circular marker at the twelve o’clock position. In the immediate post-war period, Movado launched its so-called “museum watch”. Fortunately, the missing items were discovered in northern Italy and later return to him by the police. Closer to home, HRH Prince Charles had one of his vintage Movado Ermetos stolen, along with some rather intimately themed cufflinks, in 1994 by a cat burglar who raided St James’s Palace. The celebrated artist Andy Warhol was a noted Movado Ermeto collector, with six of these included in the April 1998 auction of his personal art and antiques held in by Sotheby’s in New York following his death. Going off at a slight tangent, it is interesting to see how the Movado Ermeto seems to exert a pull over people, with many buyers initially only intending to acquire a single representative sample and then going on to accumulate many of the different variants.
This rather ambitious objective didn’t come to fruition, but certainly, the Movado Ermeto is one of the all time greats that must be represented in any serious collection.
#Esq movado watch portable#
Movado promoted the Ermeto as a new genre of portable timepiece that would usurp the wristwatch. Almost uniquely, Movado advertised the Ermeto as being a unisex watch, showing male golfers and sportsmen alongside elegant ladies dressed in the art deco fashions of the day. Introduced in 1927 with a flourish of publicity, the Movado Ermeto was a small clock that was carried on the person, with an ingenious case that when opened, served to automatically wind the movement. One of the most charming vintage Movado products isn’t actually a wristwatch at all. The working relationship between Cartier and Movado proved so effective for both parties that it continued even until the 1950s, and over the years, we have bought and sold several Kingmatic models with their original dials carrying the Cartier signature. It was this innovative streak, combined with top notch build and finish quality, that undoubtedly led to Movado movements being used, along with those by Jaeger LeCoultre, by the famous Parisian jewellery house Cartier. The firm was at the vanguard, constantly breaking new ground and supplying new and ever quirkier products to a wealthy clientele in search of something they hadn’t seen before. In the 1920s, Movado registered a huge number of patents in relation to its wristwatch movements. Demand for vintage watches by these latter two brands has largely developed in the last fifteen years whereas even back in the early 1980s when the antique wristwatch scene was still very much in its embryonic stages, Movado was already established in the minds of pioneer collectors as being of comparable importance to Rolex and Omega. By this, we mean that its golden age occurred between World War I and the very early 1960s, rather than it being revered, like Breitling and Heuer, predominantly for models introduced significantly after World War II. Movado is a true vintage watch brand in the traditional sense, rather than falling into the modern classics category.
Despite its remarkable history, largely because the current incarnation of the house is very low key and the fact that the Movado name is, unlike Rolex, Omega, Jaeger LeCoultre and the rest, not recognised by the general public in the street, its vintage output can be purchased for very modest sums of money.
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